ELISA expiry dates/ bad results - (Feb/17/2015 )

Hey guys,

I'm brand new to this forum and I just have a quick question about ELISA kits. So my PI found a bunch of really really old ELISA kits (eBioscience) that were from 2009. We had planned on just practising on them as were were going to buy new kits (we wanted to work on them before the new kits arrived). So we followed the protocol and everything but we still ended up getting really weird results. We had tried two different kits that were both very old and neither gave us very good results (standards were off, generally bad results even with triplicates).

I was just wondering, would such an old kit affect our results by a lot or would our weird results simply be because of error in our methods? Would it be worth trying it again on the other old kits that we have lying around or would it just be a waste of time? Thanks for all the help!

if you just want to perfect your technique then, by all means, try the other kits. but, don't waste valuable sample. just run standards until you get consistent results for replicates (don't count on linearity).

if you were trying to obtain usable results then forget it. use the new kits for that.