The F1000Research Antibody Validation Article Collection

Editorial

Well validated antibodies are crucial to enable scientists to make progress in a wide range of life science disciplines ranging from Neuroscience to Tissue Engineering to Plant Science. Evidence of validation is important as it allows scientists to choose antibodies that are fit for their experiments and avoid wasting time optimising antibodies that are unsuitable. Validation data also provides reviewers a guide as to whether the antibodies used in a manuscript are likely to give reliable results, something which helps to ensure experimental reproducibility, a topical issue in today’s life sciences.

Validating an antibody is a complicated process that can involve many different approaches (Bordeaux et al., 2010; Howat et al., 2014). Historically antibody validation commonly involved the now controversial antigen pre-adsorption test (Holmseth et al., 2012), while current studies may make use of knockout or knockdown tissue to demonstrate specificity. There are also large scale approaches, capable of validating many antibodies simultaneously (Holm et al., 2012). However, there is no simple experiment that can validate an antibody for all possible applications and samples. For example, validating an antibody for western blotting using a human cell line, does not guarantee the antibody will be suitable in immunohistochemistry using tissue from a rat. Instead antibody validation is a gradual process which involves testing the antibody for specific applications and species/tissues of interest, ideally using a number of approaches.

This collection provides a home for papers describing antibody validation studies. Our aim is to encourage publishing of all independent studies, both positive and negative, which increase understanding of how antibodies perform. These can range from large studies involving hundreds of antibodies, or the use of many tissues or cell lines, to small single figure studies focusing on an individual antibody in a specific setting. The main criteria are; the research group performing the validation should be independent from the company who supply the antibody, the experiments have been sufficiently repeated and the results are accurately and fully reported. It is also crucial that the Materials and methods provide enough detail to allow the experiments to be reproduced, something which is often not the case with studies using antibodies (Helsby et al., 2013). A key part of ensuring reproducibility is to make sure the antibodies can be identified by including their supplying company name and code and a resource identifier issued by the Research Identification Initiative (http://scicrunch.com/resources).

The instructions to authors (Box 1) and guidelines for reviewers have been tailored to facilitate the aim of encouraging a broad range of papers, with a focus on reproducibility and accurate reporting, rather than perceived impact. Correspondence and Opinion articles on any aspect of antibody validation are also welcomed.

This broad approach should encourage a wide range of studies, many of which may never be published without this initiative and we hope that as the collection grows it will become a valuable resource for the thousands of researchers who use antibodies.