How do you use the CiteAb search engine? Interview with Dosh Whye
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- Learn more about some interesting research from Boston Children’s Hospital
- How is the search engine used in this research?
- Find out more about some useful features of the search engine
This March marks ten years since the CiteAb search engine went live. (March 10th to be exact!)
As part of our celebrations for ten years of the CiteAb reagent search, throughout the year we will be speaking with researchers who use our reagent search tool to find out how it helps with their exciting work.
Today, we speak with Dosh Whye, a researcher working at Boston Children’s Hospital, about the work his group is undertaking and how the CiteAb search engine helps him to find reagents for this work.
Boston’s Children Hospital, a world-class children’s hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, houses the ‘Human Neuron Core’ of which Dosh is the assistant director. Their mission is to ‘bridge the gap between the clinical and basic researchers’, with a lot of work centred around modelling neurological disorders. Dosh has spent much of his career investigating neurodegeneration.
His work at the Human Neuron Core is centred around developing and using stem cell models to further understanding of complex neurodevelopmental disorders, an exciting and important area of neuroscience.
Read on to hear what he had to say…
What research is your group currently working on?
Much of our research work is focused on neurodevelopmental disorders. The team currently utilizes pluripotent stem cells to model the development of several neuronal subtypes.
A major component of our phenotypic characterization of cells involves the use of immunocytochemistry and immunofluorescence.
In a paper published this year, the group developed an approach to generate human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived cortical organoids. This overcame some limitations of previous models such as time to produce the model, and bypassing critical points of neurodevelopment.
Their protocol improved in vitro modelling of cortical development, enabling investigation into development and disease.
You can read the paper here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36633423/
What is the goal of your work?
We look to develop novel stem cell methods and advanced techniques to establish diverse cellular models of the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system.
The work of the Human Neuron Core into these models can help research initiatives in neurodevelopmental, neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.
How do you use the CiteAb search engine in your work?
We rely heavily on CiteAb to identify the most validated antibodies used in the fields of stem cell biology and neuroscience.
Using validated antibodies can give researchers increased confidence that antibodies will be specific to the target, and the results of experiments reproducible, ultimately saving time and funding further down the line.
Are there any particular features on the CiteAb search engine that you find useful?
I appreciate that the search engine ranks antibodies based on the number of citations. We also like to use the detailed antibody page that includes recommended dilutions based on application, a reference list with direct access to the publications of interest, and external links to the company product websites.
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Wrap-up
We’d like to extend a big thank you to Dosh for speaking with us about his work and experience of CiteAb.
We set up the CiteAb reagent search engine to help researchers accelerate science, and so it’s really exciting to hear researcher stories into how the search tool is used in research!
You can try the reagent search tool below:
Next year will be another milestone for us: ten years since we spun out from the University of Bath, allowing us to grow our search engine and at the same time offer data and citation services for reagent suppliers.
Finally, if you like using the CiteAb search engine for your work, don’t forget to tell your colleagues about us!
- Skye and the CiteAb team
