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Do my antibodies need to stay sterile? - (Jan/13/2010 )

How important is it for my antibodies to stay sterile if I am not using the cells for any downstream applications?

-Marilyn Haas-

Any organism contaminating your antibody stock solution will likely produce proteases that could destroy your antibodies. Is this what you mean?

-HomeBrew-

HomeBrew on Jan 13 2010, 03:34 PM said:

Any organism contaminating your antibody stock solution will likely produce proteases that will destroy your antibodies. Is this what you mean?



Yes thank you. I perform FACS regularly and recently I moved out from under a laminar flow hood to do my FACS at a bench closer to a new centrifuge to make the process quicker. I wanted to know if adding my antibodies outside the hood could cause problems.

-Marilyn Haas-

I have very rarely had problems with antibody degradation through contamination (not doing FACS though) and I never use my Abs in a hood.

-bob1-

We keep our stocks/hybridoma supernates sterile, and aliquot a working vial for bench work.

-lab rat-

yeah me too never used the hood for either reconstituting or diluting antibodies and have had no problems till now!!! i don do FSCS though... er reconstitute the antibody and aliquot into smaller vaolumes and store it in -20 until use... once we take out an aliquot as a working solution we dont freeze it further and make sure u dont keep the antibodies in a auto defrost freezer... the freeze thawing cycles will degrade the antibody

-Pradeep Iyer-