Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science
CBAL is primarily an immunoassay laboratory run by staff with over 120 years experience running immunoassays in a ‘clinical’ laboratory environment. CBAL has been in existence since July 2008 and offers biochemical analyses to members of the MDU, IMS-MRL and other researchers both nationally and internationally.
Techniques we use
- CBAL uses a variety of immunoassay platforms to provide singleplex and multiplex measurements of a range of biomarkers in human and non-human biological fluids. Most analysis is performed on serum and plasma samples but urine, CSF and cell cultures may also be analysed.
- Immunoassays are performed on the Diasorin Liaison and Siemens Dimension autoanalysers as well as methods using the MesoScale Discovery, Luminex, DELFIA and ELISA assay formats.
- CBAL places considerable importance on quality control procedures thus ensuring the results issued are reliable.
- CBAL is also able to measure a wide range of ‘routine’ biochemical tests (glucose, cholesterol, creatinine, urea etc..) on the Siemens Dimension analyser. This analyser uses a very small amount of sample (typically between 3 and 15 µl) and is capable of aspirating from sample cups with a minimum of ‘dead volume’ (15µl) thus making it ideal for non-human research studies.
Achievements
Typically CBAL (and CBAL staff) have co-authorship or acknowledgments on 10+ high impact scientific publications each year.
Our highlight publication
Yanislava Karusheva, Matthew Ratcliff, Alexander Mörseburg, Peter Barker, Audrey Melvin, Naveed Sattar, Keith Burling, Anna Backmark, Robert Roth, Lutz Jermutus, Esther Guiu-Jurado, Matthias Blüher, Paul Welsh, Marko Hyvönen, Stephen O’Rahilly. The Common H202D Variant in GDF-15 Does Not Affect Its Bioactivity but Can Significantly Interfere with Measurement of Its Circulating Levels. The Journal of Applied Laboratory Medicine, Volume 7, Issue 6, November 2022, Pages 1388–1400.
This very important paper shows that GDF-15 measurements made using antibodies supplied in R&D Systems kits significantly under-recover a commonly found variant of the biomarker. This cast doubts on the findings from many published papers where analysis has been performed with R&D kits.
