Screening of PCRP transcription factor antibodies in biochemical assays

Antibodies offer a powerful means to interrogate specific proteins in a complex milieu, and where epitope tagging is impractical. However, antibody availability and reliability are problematic. The Protein Capture Reagents Program (PCRP) generated over a thousand renewable monoclonal antibodies against human-presumptive chromatin proteins in an effort to improve reliability. However, these reagents have not been widely field-tested. We therefore screened their ability in a variety of assays. 887 unique antibodies against 681 unique chromatin proteins, of which 605 are putative sequence-specific transcription factors (TFs), were assayed by ChIP-exo. Subsets were further tested in ChIP-seq, CUT&RUN, STORM super-resolution microscopy, immunoblots, and protein binding microarray (PBM) experiments. At least 6% of the tested antibodies were validated for use in ChIP-based assays by the most stringent of our criteria. An additional 34% produced data suggesting they warranted further testing for clearer validation. We demonstrate and discuss the metrics and limitations to antibody validation in chromatin-based assays.