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?
Any organism contaminating your antibody stock solution will likely produce proteases that could destroy your antibodies. Is this what you mean?
HomeBrew on Jan 13 2010, 03:34 PM said:
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.
I have very rarely had problems with antibody degradation through contamination (not doing FACS though) and I never use my Abs in a hood.
We keep our stocks/hybridoma supernates sterile, and aliquot a working vial for bench work.
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