Reproducibility is crucial for all research reagents, to ensure that analyses and assays can be repeated both over time and by other researchers, giving the same results.
As the original manufacturer of all our products, we have full control of both the validation and reproducibility. You can trust that our antibodies are specific and perform consistently each time you use them.
Validation and reproducibility are both important to guarantee high antibody quality but are two completely different concepts.
Before an antibody is introduced in our catalog, it has been thoroughly validated to ensure specificity. All validation data is presented on the product data sheet for each antibody.
At Atlas Antibodies, we have always worked extensively with antibody validation and with producing highly characterized antibodies our customers can trust.
Learn about antibody validation
The reproducibility of a research antibody is the question of whether a new lot or new batch of an antibody performs equally compared to a previous lot or batch. Reproducibility should not be mixed up with validation or specificity of an antibody. At Atlas Antibodies, each new lot of the antibody is tested against its reference lot to make sure that new lots meet the same specificity criteria in each application. This is how we guarantee reproducibility.
For each new lot of an antibody, our Quality Control team verifies lot-to-lot reproducibility separately for each application the antibody is validated for, such as immunohistochemistry, Western blot and immunocytochemistry.
The immune response may vary between animals, and therefore a polyclonal antibody purified from a new animal serum needs a stringent quality control procedure to secure retained specificity and functionality. The standard procedure at Atlas Antibodies is to analyze each new lot in parallel with the reference lot on consecutive sample materials for all approved applications.
At Atlas Antibodies, each new production lot, but also new purifications from the same serum, is given a unique lot number to secure traceability.
The standard test set-up for quality control of an antibody for the IHC application at Atlas Antibodies consists of a tissue microarray of more than 20 different samples of both normal and cancer tissues. The new lot of the antibody is tested and compared to the reference lot on consecutive sections from the tissue microarray.
The images show examples from the quality control of antibody Anti-SATB2 (HPA001042) where a new lot is tested against its reference lot. The two left-hand images show the staining of 33 different tissues using lots B105190 and A43312 respectively. The two middle images show enlargements of the images of the staining of the rectum, both displaying nuclear staining in glandular cells. The two images to the right show the absence of staining in endometrium consistently in the two lots.