NEW YORK, June 12 - Epigentek today announced the debut of Pre-Sure(TM), a commercialized kit for quickly validating and qualifying whether antibodies are suitable for use in chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP). Officially known as the Pre-Sure(TM) ChIP Antibody Validation Kit, the innovative product is part of the company’s effort to improve the integrity of ChIP-grade antibodies in the marketplace as well as to provide a fast and affordable means for researchers to validate their own antibodies for ChIP use.
Chromatin immunoprecipitation is a major lab technique for determining whether specific proteins are associated with certain genomic regions, and is highly useful for investigating histone modifications and various epigenetic mechanisms through ChIP-PCR, ChIP-on-chip, or ChIP-seq. The success of the technique is highly dependent on an antibody’s ability to capture protein/DNA complexes specifically and sensitively, which makes it important for researchers to identify suitable antibodies as “ChIP-grade”. The largest bottleneck to a reliable ChIP experiment is the high variability of antibodies available on the market, which Epigentek addresses with Pre-Sure(TM).
“The market is saturated with questionable ChIP-grade claims of antibodies due to improper use of Western blot and immunohistochemistry data as the validation basis, both of which are actually unreliable applications for ChIP determination,” said William Lee, vice president of operations at Epigentek. “This problem is compounded by the lack of a cost-effective and easy validation method for researchers.”
Epigentek’s method solves the problem by providing both researchers and vendors the ability to validate antibodies with an inexpensive, fast, and proper method without having to do a full blown and cumbersome ChIP-PCR or ChIP sequencing run. In addition, the low cost and labor aspects of Pre-Sure(TM) provide antibody manufacturers an opportunity to economically screen their antibodies for ChIP, potentially also improving market pricing for researchers. The estimated cost, including labor, to test each antibody via Pre-Sure(TM) is less than $15, whereas validation by ChIP-PCR and ChIP-seq are in excess of $100 and $1,500 perantibody, respectively.
The 96-well plate based Pre-Sure(TM) kit utilizes control antibodies and a fluorescent method to deliver a “ChIP-Grade Intensity” reading of the test antibodies against input chromatin. In less than 3 hours, one could test up to 43 antibodies simultaneously using this kit and a fluorescence-based microplate reader.
Back in 2006, Epigentek was the first company to offer a microplate-based ChIP method to resolve throughput bottlenecks, and the Pre-Sure(TM) ChIP Antibody Validation Kit underscores another milestone of innovative efforts to overcome research obstacles in epigenetics.
About Epigentek Group Inc.
Epigentek is a New York-based biotechnology company that focuses on developing and providing innovative technologies, services, and products as a complete and systematic solution for epigenetic related research and drug discovery. Visit the informative website at http://www.epigentek.com.
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