The Thermo Scientific Pierce Co-Immunoprecipitation Kit provides covalent antibody immobilization and all the components necessary to perform a properly controlled co-IP experiment without antibody interference in the final product.

Co-IP is a common approach to study protein:protein interactions that uses an antibody to immunoprecipitate the antigen (bait protein) and co-immunoprecipitate any interacting proteins (prey proteins). Traditional co-IP methods that use Protein A or G result in co-elution of the antibody heavy and light chains that may co-migrate with relevant bands, masking important results. The Pierce Co-IP Kit resolves this issue by covalently coupling antibodies onto an amine-reactive resin. The kit includes optimized buffers for protein binding and recovery, reagents to perform control experiments and efficient spin columns and collection tubes, which shorten the protocol and minimize handling and mixing.

Features of the Co-Immunoprecipitation Kit:

• Works for any purified antibody—perform co-IP experiments using any purified antibody regardless of species or Ig class (chicken IgY, human IgE, mouse IgG1, IgM, etc.); no dependence on Protein A and Protein G affinity binding
• No antibody interference—covalent attachment method and non-reducing elution system yields pure co-IP products without contamination by the IP antibody
• Reusable antibody beads—covalent antibody immobilization allows prepared IP resin to be reused and provides potential savings of costly antibody
• Complete kit—all reagents for antibody immobilization and many IP experiments, including binding and wash buffers, elution buffer and convenient microcentrifuge spin columns to make resin manipulations easier and more efficient.
• Control beads included—underivatized agarose beads provided for use as negative control for nonspecific binding
• Versatile—co-IP method is compatible with any physiolgical (non-denaturing) protein sample buffer that is compatible with the specific antibody-antigen and protein interaction complex.

Co-immunoprecipitation (Co-IP) is a popular in-vitro method for discovering protein interactions. The Pierce Co-Immunoprecipitation Kit is configured to provide the essential tools to effectively perform Co-IP experiments in a manner that yields pure IP and co-IP products free of troublesome IP antibody. This improvement on the traditional co-IP technique is achieved by replacing Protein A/G agarose beads with AminoLink Plus Resin to which pure IP antibodies can be directly and permanently conjugated. Gentle (non-reducing, non-denaturing) elution buffer allows dissociation of the IP targets while retaining the immobilized antibody on the agarose beads. The result is a pure product that can be analyzed by Western blotting (or even sequenced) without interference from antibody.

In addition to eliminating IP antibody contamination, the antibody-conjugation method integral to the Pierce Co-IP Kit avoids non-specific binding interactions and leaching contamination that can result from traditional Protein A and Protein G methods. Although the conjugation method requires that the starting antibody be in an amine-free buffer without BSA, gelatin or other storage protein stabilizers, the fact that it does not depend on Protein A or Protein G means that any antibody species or class can be used for IP (e.g., IgM and chicken IgY). Indeed any purified protein can be immobilized for use in affinity purification of binding partners.