We are pleased to announce the start of a collaboration with Antybuddy, an antibody and protein review platform for crowdsourced independent reviews. These reviews are from bench researchers who have experimented with the antibody. No longer do you have to trust the manufacturer that the antibody works. View existing reviews on Antybuddy.com or contribute your own. As an incentive, Antybuddy has sweepstakes for coupons from antibody manufacturers.
In collaboration with Giancarlo Barone, the founder of Antybuddy, we wanted readers to have access to the published reports for antibodies and to be able to compare their performance across published reports and the independent reviews. Given ReFigure’s capability to collect figures from PubMed Central, eLife and PLOS, we have created a ReFigure Antybuddy collection where published instances of antibodies whose independent validations have been submitted on Antybuddy have been collated. You can create your own antibody refigure: collect figures where an antibody has been used from PubMed Central, eLife or PLOS (see tutorial). Most antibody users collect this information anyway before purchasing an antibody, but it is not documented, leading to a loss of knowledge that could have saved time, enhanced their impact and improved science reproducibility.
Giancarlo is an antibody crusader. His experience, and that of other antibody specialists, is that antibody performance varies from lot to lot. Thus, historical performance may not be an indicator of current performance. In our antibody ReFigure you will only find published reports from 2016 and 2017. However, given how long traditional publications are in the making (see cartoon), we cannot be certain when the experiment was actually performed.
We hope the community finds this resource useful. Please send us your suggestions/complaints or compliments. We would love to hear from you at contactrefigure@gmail.com. Here is a cool antibody picture from this eLife paper to sign off.
