Mass spectrometry has become the most powerful tool for proteomics, owing to its high-throughput capacity and molecular information yield. However, it is perhaps under-utilized in more traditional cell biology research, since historically, it was a tool developed by and for chemists. Our October issue celebrates this technology and its established and emerging biological applications with a special Focus on mass spectrometry in proteomics applications.
One of the most common frustrations among biologists is the difficulty to get their hands on a good antibody with a decent chance to work well in the particular assay they have in mind.
There is not one universal quality control test for antibodies and many commercial antibodies which are advertised to work well, say, in Western blot will perform poorly in immunoprecipitation and abysmally in a FACS machine. Examples abound and researchers often lament about the money spent on re-testing antibodies or repeating experiments that have failed due to poor antibody quality.
If you were given a choice between a large protein-protein interaction data set obtained by high-throughput experiments and another data set extracted from a collection of small-scale experiments via literature mining, which one would you trust more?