The Cell Lines & Models Database: helping you find cell lines, tissues, lysates, animal models and more
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- What is the Cell Lines & Models search engine?
- What features are available in this search tool?
- Try it out and get in touch with any feedback you have!
Updated October 2025
Looking for a cell lines and model database to help you find and select the most appropriate experimental model for your research?
Today we reintroduce you to our Cell Lines & Models search engine.
Read on for an overview of the cell line database that powers this search tool, key features, and a step by step guide for finding cell lines and models.
How the cell line search engine began
CiteAb started life as an antibody search engine, built to help scientists quickly identify reliable reagents by curating detailed data on available products and their use in life-science publications.
By gathering this information in one place, we spare researchers the time-consuming task of tracking it down across fragmented sources – and help them avoid choosing unsuitable tools that can cost both time and budget.
We gradually expanded our services for researchers to offer a free-to-use biochemical search engine, protein search engine, kits & assays search engine, nucleotide search engine and finally the cell lines & models search engine which we’re exploring today.
Tying all these search tools together is a commitment to ranking products only by citations. This means no supplier can pay to be at the top of search queries, and valuable publication data is easily accessible when evaluating cell lines and models.
What data powers the Cell Lines & Models search engine?
The cell lines search tool is built upon our comprehensive cell line database, comprising products, supplier information, citation-metrics, published images and more. We launched this tool in 2020 to help researchers cut down the countless hours spent manually searching for experimental models.
We have now collected data covering nearly 480,000 cell lines and model products, with over 480k citations.
These products include cancel cell lines, immunology cell lines, neuroscience cell lines and more, as well as tissues, lysates, cell products and animal models, from hundreds of cell line suppliers, including ATCC cell lines, Cytion cell lines, DSMZ cell lines and more.
Researchers can freely search this cell line database by creating an account here.
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How can I explore the Cell Line database? A step by step guide.
The cell line search engine has a range of features developed to help find the right products, faster.
Over the years, we’ve introduced published images to review; data from pre-prints and subscription-only journals; helpful filters to break down searches; the ability to save favourite reagents and much more.
Register for a free account here to access to all of these features.
1. Search
When performing a search for a specific product of interest from our cell line database, you can apply filters to help narrow down the results by relevance. Some filters include:
- Model type
- Genetic modification (including knockout, overexpression, reporter and more)
- Tissue
- Expression system
- Expression species
- Supplier
The results then shown are ranked by citations.
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2. Evaluate
After your initial search, you can click through to the product page to further evaluate each reagent using published images, publication information, experimental information and more when available.
You can then view the full publications, to see how your peers have used products in more detail.
At this point, you can save your favourite reagents to your account portal (when logged in) to review later, or go forward to the next stage: purchasing.
3. Purchase
On product pages, we link directly to the supplier site to enable you to carry on your evaluation and purchase products directly from the supplier. We do not sell any reagents ourselves or take commission from purchases, which means we can treat every product impartially.
We partner with many suppliers from across the globe, which helps to ensure product catalogues are always up to date and as accurate as possible.
Try it out and get in touch!
Selecting cell lines and other models is really challenging, which is we began collecting this data and incorporating it into our search engine. Ultimately, we want to help as many researchers as possible to avoid wasting their precious time and research funding and to help them accelerate their discoveries, so we get a lot of satisfaction from seeing it help users from across the world
- Andrew Chalmers, CiteAb CEO
Why not try the cell lines and models search engine out for yourself?
Do get in touch if you have any feedback on how we could improve the Cell Lines and Models search engine – we are always keen to hear from our users on what is most useful to them.
- Rhys B and the CiteAb team
FAQs
We have data covering over 480k experimental models, including more than 210k cell lines, from 156 cell line suppliers.
At CiteAb we collect data using AI-driven text mining combined with human reviewing by scientists to ensure accuracy. We mine open-access, pre-prints and closed access publications.
No, we are a cell line database but not a distributor or vendor of products.
You can reach us at hello@citeab.com – we take suggestions on board and are always looking for scientist feedback to improve our tool!
