Epitope fingerprinting is a rapid service and can be tailored to meet our customer’s need.
Besides arranging confidentiality agreements and individual service contracts, if these are required, a typical project can be divided into the following stages:
Project Design: Before getting started the project plan will be explained and tailored to individual projects. EPITOPIC provides consulting on potential requirements for the antibodies as well as possible variants of selections to study epitopes under different conditions, e.g. pH or salt concentration. If your organization is not familiar with shipments, EPITOPIC will also care about preparations required for sample shipment and help with the necessary documents required.
Data Generation: This is the first and crucial step in a project. After receiving the samples, selection experiments are carried out and data sets of peptides are generated within one to four weeks. These must meet stringent quality criteria for further analysis. If these are not met, the customer is informed how to improve for example the sample quality.
Data Analysis: Epitope fingerprinting based on statistical data from stable antibodies with well-defined epitopes is a matter of days. This will usually include additional analyses based on existing structures, specificity for variants (species) of antigens etc. During data analysis EPITOPIC will provide regular updates, in particular when the task goes beyond standard identification of epitope fingerprints.
Report: A full report is delivered, and we are of course willing to help in understanding details and may also help with additional data analysis and interpretation.
Data & More: Scientific institutions and also customers familiar with protein design and molecular modelling are often interested in receiving data sets of preselected peptide sequences. This and other information as well as support in handling the information when preparing legal and scientific documents is usually provided after the completion of the project.