CiteAb Awards 2025 Category Highlight: The Educational Resource of the Year
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- What is the Educational Resource of the Year Award?
- Who are YCharOS and why did they deserve to win?
- And a congratulations to the Highly Commended Resource, the Proteintech Learning Portal
The CiteAb Awards are long-standing industry celebrations of organisations, people and initiatives making a positive impact in the research reagent space.
With over 50 organisations recognised, we love to look back each year at a few stand-out categories to dive deeper into winners’ stories. A couple of weeks ago, we focused on the Researchers’ Choice Award, which you can read about here.
Today, we’re sharing more on the Educational Resource of the Year Award, won by YCharOS (Antibody Characterisation through Open Science), who focus on KO validation of research antibodies.
What is the Educational Resource of the Year Award?
The Educational Resource of the Year Award was introduced last year to recognise those companies going above and beyond to support researchers with initiatives focusing on education. This could be a course on a tricky technique, promoting awareness around an issue, providing data on a certain area or something else entirely.
We were so impressed with the nominations we received in 2024 that we decided to run this award again this year. You can read about the 2024 Educational Resource winners, the BioRad Flow Cytometry course, here.
We opened nominations to organisations across the globe, and asked our fantastic panel of independent judges to evaluate entries based upon reach, novelty, and impact.
We received many extremely strong nominations in this category, making our judges’ jobs far from easy.
The 2025 Judges:
- Nicole K Polinski: Director of Research Programs, The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research
- Momna Hejmadi: Associate Pro Vice Chancellor (Education Quality and Enhancement) for the University of Bath
- Giovanna Roncador: Head of Monoclonal Antibodies Unit (CNIO) and Chair of EuroMAbNet
Introducing the 2025 Winner: YCharOS
Taking home the title this year were open science organisation YCharOS.
YCharOS are a public-private partnership focusing on characterising research antibodies by knockout validation in common applications (such as immunoblot and immunofluorescence).
Antibody performance is a prevalent issue in the industry, and one that has big implications for reproducibility in research.
One recent publication from YCharOS showed that in standardised testing of over 600 antibodies, more than half failed characterisation for at least one application. (Ayoubi et al. ELife 2024).
YCharOS works with antibody manufacturers, knockout cell line providers, academic researchers, and disease foundations to help characterise antibodies. They provide transparent reports on Zenodo (currently over 140 have been shared) and publish on F1000Research.
Researchers can use this educational resource to guide antibody selection for their target, in their specific application, and gain increased confidence in antibody performance.
You can read an example publication here: A guide to selecting high-performing antibodies for Stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD1) (UniProt ID: O00767) for use in western blot, immunoprecipitation, and immunofluorescence:
Dr Riham Ayoubi from YCharOS commented:
‘Our top priority at YCharOS is not only to help scientists find the best antibodies on the market but to also guide them in utilizing these reagents to advance their research. A researcher’s toolbox always includes the right reagent, the right protocol, and the right sample. This is why educating young scientists is an inherent part of the YCharOS mission. We thank you, CiteAb, for recognizing our efforts, and it is an honor to be “Educational Resource of Year 2025”.
You’ll be able to hear more about YCharOS from Carl Laflamme (Neuro-SGC, YCharOS initiative) at the International Antibody Validation Meeting held this September in Bath – you can learn more about the 25 confirmed AbVal speakers and register here.
Did you know, to better help researchers choose reliable antibodies when using the CiteAb reagent search engine, we have introduced direct links to YCharOS reports from our product pages? You can read more about the CiteAb- YCharOS partnership here.
Highly Commended: Proteintech Learning Portal
We would be remiss to not congratulate the Highly Commended resource in this category: the Proteintech Learning Portal.
This initiative is designed to help early careers researchers perform better experiments with comprehensive, free training courses. You can read more about it here. https://learn.ptglab.com/
Get involved in the 2026 CiteAb Awards
If you’d like to nominate in a category in the CiteAb Awards next year, we’d love to hear from you once categories go live in January! Follow us on our social media channels or subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to hear when nominations officially open.