https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4160575/
This study was titled not for the faint hearted, because?
A. It demonstrates that making predictions based on antibody and antigen interactions is extremely hard to impossible to do.
B. Because the study focuses on the industrial integrity of antibody and antigen industry, and the standards and calibrations which are compromised by poor quality, the paper put it PBS, as it outlines study after study exemplifying the fail of commercial standard.
C.or blatantly states "To date, it is extremely rare for patterns of immuno-EM studies to be reported, but independent searches in the literature can be very useful to identify studies in which the same antibodies have already been used. Worryingly, it is also extremely unusual for companies to report results of peptide inhibition studies and sadly even rarer for them to report KD/KO data."
D. While the long road between antigen and antibody is a rocky one, more judicious use of specificity controls by commercial companies would be highly desirable for improving the reliability and usefulness of these powerful tools for cell biology and related disciplines. At least for EM some effective methods are now available for establishing quantitative estimates of labeling distributions, and for determining more accurately how much of the labeling is due to the interactions of the antibody with the intended target. Given the commercial importance of the market and the extent to which researchers are dependent on their products, it is now high time for the companies to put more effort in trying to ensure that more of the estimated 350,000 antibodies on the market do what they are claimed to do.
(ding ding ding, it's d all of the above, with the banger being that all those pictures of viruses isolated and presented as viruses don't exist, as just now we can establish some standards over how a piece of gold would look if attached to this peptide, or to this antigen, which is basically in it's infancy, yet we've been told their safe based on theory that hardly had evidence to back it up and mountains of evidence of it's "pitfalls")