Happy birthday to us! This month we celebrate the first anniversary of the Atlas Antibodies blog. Has it been one year already? It feels like just the other day we were setting up the blog thinking about you, listing our favorite topics, goals, and aspirations. It has been an incredible and a great learning experience for all of us. If you have missed or want to have another look at our blogs read on.

The importance of taking advice from the right people

Always seek advice from the right people! It seems obvious, right? Nonetheless, it is difficult nowadays to navigate the web between everyone’s advice on what to do and how to do it. It's easier to find someone who tells you what you want to hear, compared to someone who helps you understand what you need to learn.  

Based on more than two decades of experience in immunohistochemistry and antibody validation, we know that our blog serves as an educational and problem-solving tool rather than being a mere collection of protocols and antibody catalogs copied from the web. And you should know too.

Our favorite blog topics

Over the past year, we have introduced you to several topics all based on our expertise such as the importance of antibody validation, to ensure high-quality standards for antibody production and usage or our tips for optimizing your daily immunohistochemistry experiments.

We have spread knowledge about the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) project both as an educational resource and as a necessary database for knowing more about the human proteome. We have also met with scientists at the bench to listen to their thoughts, challenges, and future expectations.

Let's take a closer look at some of our blogs:

1. Blogs on Antibody Validation

The key factor in succeeding with your experiments is to make sure that your primary antibody is thoroughly validated for your application. In the following blog posts, we share our best advice on how to properly validate an antibody by introducing to you the concept of Enhanced Validation:

• Journals require validated antibodies. What does that mean for me?
• 5 tips about validation when choosing an antibody
• How Enhanced Validation by Atlas Antibodies helps you get your research published
• How do I know if I can trust my antibody?
• Can I use an antibody targeting a human protein in another model organism?
• Contribute to advancing science by publishing your negative results
• 3 case studies: antibodies are valuable tools in clinical research 

2. Blogs on IHC Troubleshooting

Are you stuck in your IHC experiment or having issues getting your antibody to work properly? To achieve the best IHC result every step counts! How you treat your tissue samples, from fixation to dehydration, the antigen retrieval methods, and the correctness of your positive and negative controls. Not least the composition of the chemical buffers. Below is a list with our best advice on how to tackle common problems in IHC:

• Do you have your IHC controls under control?
• Control Your IHC: Primary Antibody Controls You Should Know
• Artifacts in IHC: the usual suspects
• Tissue processing - how to succeed with your IHC part I
• Antigen retrieval - how to succeed with your IHC part II
• Buffers and chemicals - how to succeed with your IHC part III 
  
  

3. Blogs on the Human Protein Atlas

The Human Protein Atlas (HPA) is a Swedish-based program initiated in 2003 to map all the human proteins in cells, tissues, and organs using the integration of various omics technologies, including antibody-based imaging, mass spectrometry-based proteomics, transcriptomics, and systems biology. See below our blogs on the topic:

• Which tissues are my proteins expressed in? A Guide to the Human Protein Atlas
• Learn how to use the Human Protein Atlas: three ways to navigate the Tissue Atlas
• The Pathology Atlas - a discovery journey in cancer research
• 3 steps to publishing a paper using the Tissue Atlas - a case study
• Which organelles are my proteins expressed in? An overview using the Cell Atlas
• Mapping the human brain - a guide to the Brain Atlas 
  
  

4. Interview with Scientists: Experts' Opinions

One of the challenges in conducting an interview isn’t just understanding the science is also trying to get the scientists to speak in a way that the general public would understand. In our blog series “Interview with a Scientist”, we ask our scientists to talk engagingly about their work and to explain what excites them about their projects and which challenges are ahead.

Have a peek at our interviews here:

• IHC: past, present, and future challenges (an interview with Dr. Caroline Kampf)
• Multiplexing IHC: past, present, and future challenges (interview with Dr. Kristian Moller)
• The Tissue Atlas: past, present, and future challenges (interview with Dr. Cecilia Lindskog)
• The Brain Atlas: past, present, and future challenges (interview with Dr. Jan Mulder)
• The Cell Atlas: past, present, and future challenges (interview with Dr. Peter Thul) 

Closing an exciting year and looking forward to new challenges

It has been a wonderful journey so far! A new exciting year is approaching, and we have already started planning interesting topics for you to read.

On this special day, we want to say thank you so much for allowing us to share our knowledge with you all. A sincere thank you!