I’m working with pathogenic bacteria only using the worm as an infection model and I’m trying to separate bacteria from worm lysates. Now I need better controls and I thought about using (labelled?) antibodies against specific worm proteins in order to check if my lysate is worm-free or not! Unfortunately I have no idea about worm antibodies…
I was hoping that someone of you might have an idea about which kind of antibody/target structure I could use. I also need to know where I could order it! :-\ Is this possible at all?
We usually use a monoclonal anti-alpha-tubulin antibody from Sigma (T6199) as a loading control in western blots, it seems specific (ie. usually a single predominant band in my WB). I think that there’s a good chance that a tubulin or actin antibody could suit your purposes. It might be worth trying or borrowing a small amount of a tubulin antibody for your experiment and testing it on worm vs pathogen extracts. I know that bacteria have two recently described tubulin proteins, but they may be diverged enough from their eukaryotic counterparts for your experiments to work. If that fails, you could look through the literature for muscle-specific antibodies used in C. elegans. That could also suit your purposes.
