Welcome to the Abcam blog

Regular readers of the blog will remember a post about an upcoming beta test site. We are happy to say, it's live!

As blog subscribers we would like to invite you to use the new website. Although all new designs are in beta form, the website itself is still completely functional, you can still search for products, place orders, view your account, etc. The first page layout to get a facelift is the datasheet, improvements include:

• Key scientific and purchase information presented clearly positioned more prominently
• Downloadable PDF version
• Image gallery
• Redesigned applications, reviews, references and scientific support sections.

Our aim is to gain your valuable feedback, we want you to use the new layout and let us know what you do like and what you don't. To do this all pages with new elements will feature a feedback tab on the right hand side, you will be able to tell us your topic, a score (to indicate importance of suggestion 1 being low, 5 being high) and most importantly leave a comment.

We will then use this feedback to improve our initial ideas before making the changes accessible by all our visitors.

Abcam are looking to open up a beta test site soon for selected customers.

The beta site will have all the functionalities of our regular site but you will be able to preview any new redesigns we have implemented; we want to gain valuable feedback from you.

Over the years we have used the knowledge of internal and external scientists to help give fresh ideas for various areas of our site; why have they come to the site, what areas of the site appeal to them the most? We want to give our customers the best possible experience when visiting; from a stress free experience at the basket, clear and informative datasheets, or a welcoming homepage.

Are you interested in helping improve our website? Then please register your interest by emailing us at betatest@abcam.com.

Below are a few examples of how our site has evolved over the last few years.

We've redesigned our conference web pages to make it easier for you to find what you're looking for.

Registration, venue, abstract guidelines and event program are now displayed in separate tabs:

And it couldn't have been timed any better, because we have just added two new scientific events in our calendar! Registration is now open for:

Stochastic Events in Stem Cell Differentiation and Reprogramming

October 28-29, 2010
Las Vegas, Nevada USA

Chaired by Kevin Eggan (Dept. of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University, USA)

Topics

• Programming and reprogramming.
• RNA control of stem cell and developmental biology.
• Chromatin mediated control of stem cell differentiation.

London Chromatin Club

April 21, 2010
London, UK

The latest in our long-running series of conferences for the Chromatin community, organized by Andy Bannister in association with Abcam.

Keynote speaker announced: Michiel Vermeulen (Department of Physiological Chemistry, University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands)

What do you think of the new design? Are you excited about attending the upcoming events? Add a comment to this blog or email us.

Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) enables the mapping of target proteins/histone modifications to specific loci in the genome. Antibodies and protein A beads, which have a higher affinity for some immunoglobulin isotypes, are used to immunoprecipitate chromatin/DNA complexes. The DNA region of interest is determined using quantitative PCR.

Here are six protocols to help you get the best out of your experiment.

ChIP protocols

• ChIP tips by Dr Andy Bannister (Gurdon institute)
• Troubleshooting tips to ensure successful ChIP
• ChIP using plant samples - Arabidopsis
• Chromatin preparation from tissues for ChIP
• Cross-linking chromatin immunoprecipitation (x-ChIP)
• Native chromatin immunoprecipitation

If you're working in a different application, we now have over 70 protocols, including guides for ELISA, FACS, IP and WB, and Abcam's Scientific support team are adding more all the time!

New ChIP primers - fast, easy, and consistent

We can now provide validated ChIP primers which you can use to:

• Test antibodies for use in ChIP
• Control for antibodies already validated in ChIP

Understanding your needs better

We're continually trying to improve our service and bring you the best possible solutions for your research, so at the end of July we held three focus groups to meet with scientists and discuss the challenges they face in their labs today.

Just as you would expect from Abcam, we kept these groups friendly and informal and we invited a great mix of attendees, with Head of Labs, Lab Managers, Research Assistants, Post-docs and Post-grads from a wide range of organizations and institutes.

Here's a brief overview of what topics came up in the discussions:

• Lab environment
• Support/technical help
• Equipment
• Consumables

These sessions were very successful at giving us an insight into your experience of day-to-day lab work, and how we can help you better.

Website design testing

Talking of meeting customers, last month I took a trip to UCL with Abcam's web designer Sarah. We were there to visit scientists from the Center for Perinatal Brain Protection & Repair and show them some very early designs of what improvements to our website could look like. (I've talked about similar sorts of sessions we've ran for other improvements to our website previously).

Thanks for having us round, I hope you enjoyed testing our new ideas out! We got some really useful feedback and some great information that we can use to develop our website designs and make them easier for scientists to use.

Keep in touch

Focus groups are just one of the ways we can keep in touch with our customers, learn how we can improve our products, and stay at the cutting-edge of research! If you have anything you'd like to discuss or comment on you can:

• Meet our experts at the scientific conferences we attend (and the ones we organize)
• Submit online feedback on our web pages, to let us know what you found useful, any suggestions for improvements, or if you're having any problems
• Write reviews to share your experience of how our products perform, and gain that reward points you can exchange for Amazon or Abcam discounts
• Contact us by phone, fax, or email for some old-fashioned human interaction :)

And you can even leave a comment on this blog!

What's the biggest challenge that you face in your labs?

What do you most enjoy about being in research?

Customer reviews let you know how our antibodies are performing and help you choose the right product for your research.

Unique to Abcam, our Abreviews® scheme benefits our customers in many ways:

• See completely independent results, images and experimental conditions for particular products
• Reviews help us maintain high-quality products
• Scientists who submit reviews are rewarded for their time

We publish all feedback, positive or otherwise, on the reviews section of the datasheet.

Five-star customer review of Tyrosine Hydroxylase antibody - Neuronal Marker (ab112) used in Immunohistochemistry (Frozen sections)

Share your experience of our products

It's easy to submit a review.

• Go to the reviews section of the product datasheet, or submit an Abreview now!
• Select the appropriate application and species and complete the short form, which covers information such as concentration, sample type and controls
• There's space to add any additional notes, images, or the PubMed ID if you've published this work.
• You can save the review and come back to it at any time

Once your review has been checked by our Scientific Support team, it is published in the reviews section of the datasheet.

Be rewarded for your review

As well as sharing information with other researchers, you will earn rewards (Abpoints®) and can exchange them for Abcam discounts or Amazon vouchers.

The less characterized the product you review, the more points you will receive - and if you submit an image you earn an extra 100 points!

Tell other scientists how our antibodies work for you

You can read more about Abreviews or let us know what you think of the scheme through the blog comments below

You may have noticed a few changes to our datasheets...

1. Making our information clearer
2. Making our datasheets easier to print
3. Simplifying country selection

Making our information clearer

We've reorganized the top section of our datasheets to make it easier for you to see the availability, price and delivery information for an antibody. The new icons to show average Abreview rating are a great way to see what other scientists think.

The tabs below allow you to easily swap between the datasheet, references, Abreviews, FAQs and protocols for the antibody you're looking at. You can also see related products, such as compatible secondary antibodies.

The more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed a change to our pages. The bottom right hand corner of our pages, to be precise.

We've introduced a new way to let us know what you think about our website. If you click the icon, you'll see a form where you can fill in your feedback on the content of a page, make suggestions, or tell us about any problems you're having. This system will track the page you made the comments on, so when we make any improvements, we'll know straight where to go.

After a lot of work, testing and development, we've launched our new website. We want to make it as easy as possible to find the antibody you're looking for, so your feedback is very valuable. Let me know what you think by adding a comment to this post.

More ways to find our antibodies and reagents

As our catalog's now grown to over 45,000 products, we've decided to do a little re-organization. By selecting the new options in our navigation bar, you can now browse our catalog by product type, or by research area.