My least favorite thing when running a western blot is trying to figure out what antibodies will work best. Loads of companies make loads of competing antibodies and it's very difficult to figure out which one is going to work the best without trying them. Well this is a pretty big community and we ought to be able to share good results with each other that will help save us time. So, here's a thread where (I hope) people will be able to quickly get feedback about which antibodies work best for their protein of interest. I'd like to see this thread take off and get pinned, but I guess we'll see if anyone else thinks this is a good idea. And, ah, if there's another thread like this already someone could point the way there for me....
I was recently testing a couple of GFP antibodies for mouse cardiac tissue. We have long used
Abcam 290 but it was giving me a nonspecific band directly above the GFP band. So we tried another,
Vector Labs BA-0702, which worked wonderfully well. I've attached a picture so you can see the difference. The picture isn't perfect but you can clearly see that the Abcam (top) has a nonspecific band, whereas the Vector Labs version (bottom) is clean.
So... if anyone would like to share decent iNOS or tubulin antibodies for use on mouse protein, I'd be much obliged. It sounds like tubulin is the way to go for a housekeeping protein if you're looking at ischemic tissue, so I need to check one out.