Members of the Antibody Characterization Group
Current members:
carl.laflamme [at] mcgill.ca (Dr. Carl Laflamme: Academic Associate, Group Leader)
Dr. Riham Ayoubi: Director of Operations
Maryam Fotouhi: Laboratory Technician
Sara Bolivar: Laboratory Technician
Philip Thorne: Laboratory Technician
Ian McDowell: Graduate student
Donovan Worrall: Undergrad
Kathleen Southern: Undergrad
Vera Moleon: Research Assistant
Charles Alende: Research Assistant
Vincent Francis: Research Associate (part time)
Active collaboration with Joel Ryan at the Advanced Bio-Imaging Facility at McGill
Past members:
Lynda Dekakra-Bellili: Laboratory Technician
Walaa Alshafie: PDF
There are between 3.5 and 4.8 million commercial antibodies covering minimally 95% of human gene products. These antibodies are often poorly validated leading to approximately $1 billion per/ann. wasted on antibodies that do not recognize their intended target. Importantly, this is a key factor in the reproducibility crisis.
The antibody characterization group in the McPherson laboratory follows a methodology formalized in the McPherson laboratory. The group performs head-to-head comparisons of all commercially-available antibodies from 11 antibody manufacturing partners against any given protein target using a characterization pipeline based on knockout (KO) cells. Thus, for any given protein target (targets have thus far been chosen by the funders), control and isogenic KO lines are provided by 2 commercial partners, which have many thousands of lines, or are generated in house. All antibodies are tested in three applications, immunoblot, immunoprecipitation, and immunocytochemistry. Antibody reports are generated and are published without restriction on Zenodo, a data sharing site operated by CERN: https://zenodo.org/communities/ycharos/. Our 80 published antibody characterization reports and our immunoblot, immunoprecipitation and immunofluorescence protocols have been viewed and downloaded thousands of times and independent disease-related organizations are also sharing the reports.
We were the international recipients of the Neuro-Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation Open Science Prize
