Skip the secondary, Part 2! :)

In one of the LCI earlier posts, you can read about easy and powerful it is to skip using a secondary antibody while still having a bright signal.

We have not had any feedback on the Kromnigon technology but we got to hear great praise and see superb images of a similar product called Mix-n-Stain by Biotium.

You can now directly label your stock of primary or favorite tag ligand (Snap, Clip, Halo, TMP) in just 30 min! Each primary gets 3-5 fluorophores according to the Mix-n-Stain brochure  so there is no problem with dim directly labelled antibodies as used to be the case in older labeling technologies.

Skipping the secondary means gaining time but also no more headache about matching antibody and tissue species so you can stain your tissue with 7 or 8 antibodies if you image with narrow filters or spectral unmixing.

Bye bye ‘No primary’ controls! It is high time to switch to an isotype control: buy an antibody with the same isotype as your favorite antibody and label it in the same way. This allows you to detect any aspecific binding of your primary antibody.

Last but not least, skipping the secondary means less animals used to produce them. That alone is a bit plus!

It costs 100€ or so to label 50 ug of antibody. Definitely worth a try! 🙂

Learn about Expansion microscopy

Next wednesday morning, David Unnersjö-Jess from KTH/Scilife will give a talk at the Live cell imaging facility (9:30, DNA seminar room), about a new and exciting aspect of microscopy: Expansion microscopy.

This is a technique where one ‘blows up’ the sample while keeping all proteins in place and at the same relative distance from each other. The sample is simply ‘inflated’. One can then take images of it with a normal microscope but the resulting image give a much higher resolution than normal microscopy.

After the seminar, David will have an open discussion with anyone who would like to try the technique.

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