Inside NIF: Looking for Antibodies?

Finding a working antibody for your proteins of interest can be a difficult process. Similar antibodies are available from a number of different antibody providers and depending on which vendor your order the antibody from, you could have varying levels of success. The Neuroscience Information Framework currently maintains two antibody resources: the Antibody Registry and the Antibody Table.

The Antibody Registry serves the scientific community by providing a list of antibodies (> 890,000) as well as a set of unique identifiers for commercial and non-commercial  antibody reagents. These features enhance scientist's ability to keep track of data generated using a specific antibody. In other words, it allows antibody providers to determine which experiments used a particular antibody and it allows scientists to track usage of antibodies developed within their lab.

The Antibody Table is a compilation of data submitted from most antibody vendors, such as Labome and Biocompare.

Searching for NIF for antibodies can be done using the following search syntax: antibodyregistry gene:grm1 (shown below).

This will limit your results to within the Antibody Registry and provide you with product information organized by genes, species, and reagent types (antibodies, recombinant, proteins, ELISA, siRNA, cDNA clones). From here, you should be able to locate an antibody useful for your particular experiment design, see how it has worked for other experiments and click out to an ordering page to get the research moving forward!

NIF is always working to increase the number of antibody resources and we invite you to recommend a resource. Additionally, the Antibody Registry allows any user to submit a new antibody or set of antibodies via web form or spread sheet upload.

For more information on the Antibody Registry, please check out the Antibody Registry tutorial.