Features www.BioTechniques.com111Vol. 56 | No. 3 | 2014 Tech News

Imagine you’re just starting in a lab. Your new PI decides to test your mettle at the bench with a simple project: Replicate some immunohistochemistry results from a recent publication. No problem, right? Not necessarily. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) relies on antibodies, and antibodies, says Anita Bandrowski of the University of California, San Diego, “are extremely messy. ” Unlike many reagents in today’s molecular biology lab, antibodies are far from the turnkey solutions commercial vendors would have you believe. Antibodypedia.com lists 1.2 million antibodies in its database. Some work in Western blots but not in IHC, others can precipitate protein complexes but come up empty in flow cytometry, and some don’t work at all. More than a quarter of 246 histone modification antibodies tested in a 2011 study were found to be non-specific; of those that were specific, 22 % were unsuitable for chromatin immunoprecipi-tation (1). Perhaps more alarmingly, some antibodies work, but recognize the wrong target. In that 2011 study, 4 antibodies “showed 100 % specificity, but for the wrong [histone] peptide, ” the authors reported. “We have talked to a lot of researchers who say this is actually one of the single biggest problems that they’ve experienced with reagents in the lab, ” says Elizabet