“Shitty reagents generate shitty science. They waste money and waste careers,” says biochemist Aled Edwards, head of the Structural Genomics Consortium, a public–private partnership to study proteins important to drug-discovery efforts.
These guys have created a website for scientists to share their experience of moleculare probes- the good the bad and the ugly!
And about time too! The amount of time, energy and money that is wasted because of bad reagents is staggering! We have experineced this time and again in the lab- and not only with “chemicla probes” – ELISAs, antibodies, kits of all description- you name it we have probably wasted at least a week and at least several hundred pounds (without taking into consideration man hours and cost of other reagents) because the reagenst dont do what it says on the tin!!
Let’s hope their portal gains momentum, and others like it too – such as this one for antibodies – Benchwise.
Source: you can read the full original article here and Nature News and Comments article here
The Gartland Lab 