Immunology

To save millions of dollars and dramatically improve reproducibility, protein-binding reagents must be defined by their sequences and produced as recombinant proteins, say Andrew Bradbury, Andreas Plückthun and 110 co-signatories.

 

As a first step, we ask the scientific leadership of the NIH and the EU to convene academic users, technology developers, biotech companies, funding agencies and publishers, and establish a realistic timetable for the transition to these high-quality binding reagents.

 

Making sequenced well-characterized reagents is alone unlikely to change the behaviour of researchers. One possible outcome of such a meeting could be that publishers and funding agencies should mandate that in, say, five to ten years time, and contingent on appropriate investment, all binding reagents in published papers are recombinant and defined at the sequence level. This would mirror the requirements for the past few decades that gene sequences and coordinates for new protein structures be deposited and made publicly available.

Via Krishan Maggon