See which antibodies in a paper have been tested

What it looks like on a paper

Real papers, marked by the extension. Each mention is coloured for the application that paper used it in; hovering one opens the card behind it, with the knockout-controlled image the result rests on.

A mark is a result, not advice: each one reports how that antibody performed when it was tested against a genetic control under the community consensus protocols, in the applications those protocols cover.

What the colours mean

Results are given per application. An antibody that works on a Western blot may fail in immunofluorescence, so the extension reads the application from the surrounding text and colours the mention for that application. Of the antibodies we have published against TDP-43, two thirds pass in one application and fail in another.

Results are based on consensus protocols. Antibody performance is protocol and sample dependent, and these results do not validate or invalidate experiments in other assay systems or sample types. Read the protocols.

Immunofluorescence results are fixation and permeabilisation dependent.

If your institution blocks extensions

Many universities and institutes manage Chrome, Edge and Firefox centrally and allow only approved extensions. If Add to Chrome does nothing, or Firefox refuses the install, that is usually what has happened — and it is a decision your IT team can reverse. They generally need three things: what it does, what it can reach, and its identifier.

A note you can send them

What IT will ask for

The policy settings

For an administrator who already manages browsers. Allowing lets people install it if they want to; force-installing deploys it to everyone. Either is fine — nothing about the extension needs it to be mandatory.

Chrome and Edge — add the ID to ExtensionInstallAllowlist, or to ExtensionInstallForcelist to deploy it:

ExtensionInstallAllowlist = [ "pkmfholpagoaiigfpbkalnpipkiiidlp" ]

Firefox — an ExtensionSettings entry. The extension is distributed by us rather than through addons.mozilla.org, so the install URL is ours:

"ExtensionSettings": {
  "extension@onlygoodantibodies.co.uk": {
    "installation_mode": "allowed",
    "install_url": "https://onlygoodantibodies.co.uk/extension/firefox.xpi"
  }
}

Use force_installed in place of allowed to deploy it to everyone. Firefox needs install_url either way, because the add-on is not listed on addons.mozilla.org.

If the answer is no

Nothing here is only in the extension. Every verdict it shows is on the gene pages of this site, in the public API, and through the MCP connector, which needs no browser extension at all. The extension saves you looking things up; it is not the only way to get the answer.

Where it runs

On journal and preprint sites — Nature, Science, Cell Press, ScienceDirect, Wiley, Springer, PLOS, eLife, Frontiers, MDPI, OUP, bioRxiv, medRxiv, PubMed and PMC among others. Supplier catalogue pages can be switched on in settings, so you see the same results while choosing what to buy.

It reads the HTML full text of a page. A paper opened as a PDF is not annotated.

What it can and cannot tell you

• It reports what independent testing found. It does not judge the paper.
• Most antibodies have never been independently tested. Grey means we have no result for the application used here.
• Which application a reagent was used for is inferred from the surrounding text. Where a page is ambiguous the extension falls back to a whole-antibody summary and says so on the card.
• Every card links to the knockout-controlled images, the RRID and the published report, so you can check the colour yourself.

It is an early release — tell us what you find

This is the first public version. The most useful thing you can do is open papers you know well and check the marks against what you already believe about those antibodies. Worth a message:

• A colour that looks wrong on an antibody you know.
• An antibody the paper cites that was left unmarked.
• A mark on ordinary text that was never a catalogue number.
• A journal or preprint site where nothing is marked at all.

Say which page you were on and what you expected — get in touch. A store review helps other people find the extension; the specifics reach us faster here.

Building on the same data

The extension reads a public snapshot of the dataset, refreshed daily:

/extension/index.json

The same data is available to AI assistants through our MCP connector, so an assistant reading a manuscript can flag the same antibodies. If you are building something with it, tell us — we would like to help.