Suppliers
Affiniti Research Products
Suppliers of custom peptides and custom antibodies. They have made more than 200 different peptide sequences for us, and are one of the best companies we have dealt with. The products are of excellent quality and the service is second to none. The antibodies they generated for us were the best polyclonals we have had made. The staff are very knowledgeable on all aspects of their product line. Highly recommended.
Improvision
Suppliers of software for image processing and analysis. This company developed the major software tools (OpenLab) which we use for Quantitative Immunofluorescence. OpenLab is a flexible image analysis software package suitable for many different applications in the lab. We also use VoloCity, a new movement tracking software package for analysing migration experiments. Recommended, but with some reservations.
Jackson ImmunoResearch
Suppliers of secondary antibodies. Almost all of the secondary antibodies we use are supplied by this company. They have the widest selection, but more importantly offer very high quality products that exhibit unrivalled specificity. Except in specialist applications, we cannot imagine why anyone would consider using secondary antibody reagents from any other supplier. Highly recommended. Note that in the UK, the products are distributed by Stratech Scientific Ltd (www.stratech.co.uk).
MRC Geneservice
www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/ geneservice
R&D Systems
Suppliers of cytokines, antibodies against cytokines and ELISA kits. Generally good quality products, although we have encountered one or two problems mainly as a result of poor quality technical support. Most of the cytokines and antibodies work well in a wide range of applications, and the ELISA kits are generally better validated than most competing products. The biggest problem is generally their unwillingness to provide compositions of buffers and other reagents. Recommended, with some reservations.
Serotec
Suppliers of immunology reagents and other primary antibodies. They have a very wide range of antibodies for flow cytometry, with particular emphasis on reagents for leukocyte typing. Very competitively priced antibodies, which usually work well for the stated applications. They also offer a very useful free antibody location service. Recommended.
Sigma Genosys
Suppliers of custom peptides and custom antibodies. They have prepared a s number of polyclonal antisera for us. They offer a basic service at a competitive price, but the success of your project will depend on your ability to design your experimental protocol without a great deal of technical assistance. For complex project, we prefer Affiniti Research Products, but for simple anti-peptide antibody projects they are keenly priced. Recommended, with some reservations.
Umetrics
Suppliers of software for megavariate data analysis. This company developed the major software tools which we use for the analysis of very large datasets. We use SIMCA-P+ version 10 for all our chemometric work. These are superb, easy to use software packages which will revolutionise the way you do data analysis. We also use MODDE, a unique design-of-experiment software package. Highly recommended.