ELISA kit - (May/31/2011 )

Hi. When buying an ELISA kit, what information do I need to be looking for?
I am planning to buy an Anti-Mouse IL-1beta ELISA kit but I'm not sure which one will work. Can someone help me with this?
Thanks!

globy123 on Tue May 31 19:02:02 2011 said:

The ELISA kit business is big and frequently unscrupulous. The buyer has to 'beware'. Some imported kit manufacturers produce products that will produce a color in the well, in an attempt to get the user to believe that it works. All this is under the radar of customs and import regulators because they don't have immunoassay PhD inspectors. The same kit manufacturers will produce kits for molecules that don't exist (for example rat prostate specific antigen or PSA among others....do the search!!). If in doubt, design your own tests of quality, buy an independent source of antigen, see if it behaves appropriately in the assay.

On to specifics, if I were to start looking at kits for mouse IL1-beta, I would search for available kits, perform a literature search and see which of the kits have been used for studies in reputable journals.

Candidate kits I would look at would be R+D systems SMLBOOB or SMLBOOC and Pierce EM2IL1B. In addition, technical support available from these vendors is always available and helpful.

If you are going to evaluate more than one kit, check that you are not buying the same kit from two different suppliers, this check can be performed by comparing the kit inserts from each supplier.

Let us know how you get on.