species cross reactivity - assay to determine cross reactivity (Feb/16/2005 )

I am working with a hamster stress model and would like to look at various cytokines, growth factors and ECM proteins. How can I determine whether an ELISA kit for rat will work with hamster plasma or tissue?

we had the same problem with mongolian gerbils....

there are three ways:

1) you have to try and see if there's cross reactivity....
2) you can do a literature search and see what elisa-kits other people used to detect haster proteins, then you try it out....
3) you could first check out the aminoacid sequence similarity of the hamster protein(s) you want to detect with the respective mouse or rat sequences at the epitope detected by the commercially availabe antibody, and if the similarity is high enough to satisfy your conscience, then you try it out....

in my oppinion, you just have to try it, there's no good way of predicing wheter it will show crossreacivity or not yet.

BTW, we ended up with establishing a quantitative real-time PCR for detection of cytokine, growthfactor, etc. mRNAs.....

mike