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 reagent search engine and the key search features, or get straight to trying it out below.
Plus, if you’re a reagent supplier, now is a great time to partner with us and maximise the benefits of listing cell lines and models on our reagent search engine.
What is the Cell Lines & Models search engine?
Our 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 looking for experimental models for their research.
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.
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CiteAb started life as an antibody search engine, gradually expanding 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 highly accurate citations. This means no supplier can pay to be at the top of your search query, and that you can trust the data shown on our reagent search engines.
How can I explore the Cell Line database?
Our cell line search engine has a range of features developed to help in finding the right products in the most efficient way. 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 have access to all of these features.
Here’s how you can use the search engine to find the products you need:
1. Search
When performing a search for a specific product of interest, you can apply filters to help narrow down the 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 so the most relevant ones are displayed. 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 help you see how your peers have used the cell lines and models in the past 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.
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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 for your searching.
Try it out and get in touch!
Andrew Chalmers, CEO of CiteAb commented:
‘Our cell line search database has grown remarkably over the years, and we’re really excited to see the impact it has on researchers searching for the right product for their experiment. With so much choice, it can be challenging to know where to start, which is why we want to keep providing this data in an easily accessible way for researchers to accelerate their discoveries.
Why not try the cell lines and models search engine out for yourself? Start your search below:
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!
