Central to reproducibility in biomedical research is being able to use well-characterized and defined reagents. The CPTAC Antibody Portal serves as a National Cancer Institute (NCI) community resource that provides access to a large number of standardized renewable affinity reagents (to cancer-associated targets) and accompanying characterization data.
Antibodies are among the most commonly used tools in the biological sciences - put to work in many experiments to identify and isolate other molecules. As a result, rigorous antibody validation is performed at the NCI Antibody Characterization Laboratory, an unbiased intramural reference laboratory located at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, to validate antibody specificity and reproducibility, in alignment with the National Institutes of Health’s Rigor and Reproducibility Principles and Guidelines. Antigens and antibodies are expressed, purified and characterized using standard operating procedures (SOPs), with all accompanying protocols/SOPs and data made available to the public (transparency being a key validation).