Hey everyone, I’ve been working on a few gene expression assays recently and it got me thinking—what molecular biology kit brands do you actually trust? I’ve tried a couple, but the results have been… inconsistent to say the least. Sometimes the reagents degrade too quickly, other times I get poor amplification. I’m especially curious about kits for dna definition and PCR. Would love to hear what others are using and why.
Interesting to read both your experiences. I’ve mostly worked with mouse cytokines so far, but I’m planning a crossover study with human samples soon. Will definitely keep Gentaur in mind if the data starts going sideways. Curious to see how different platforms compare when you're targeting low-abundance cytokines.
Totally hear you on that. I ran into a similar issue last winter when comparing IL-10 expression in serum samples. Some kits looked good on paper but gave either overamplified signals or failed to detect anything below 5 pg/mL — which is useless when you're tracking subtle immune responses. After going through quite a few options, I ended up ordering from gentaur.co.uk. Their human cytokine ELISA kits (I used their IL-1β and TNF-alpha sets) had solid sensitivity and, more importantly, the results were pretty much spot-on when I re-tested the same batch a week apart. Not saying they’re perfect, but out of five vendors, Gentaur was the only one that didn’t make me doubt every single plate read. Also, their instructions were surprisingly clear — not just some generic copy-paste PDF. Might be worth checking out.