I hate antibodies. There, I said it. When they work, they are an exquisite tool; when they don't, which seems to be most of the bloody time, they are an infuriating waste of money and effort.

About the only thing I hate more than antibodies is shopping, especially comparison shopping, for antibodies. Biocompare is OK, but not great -- and I distrust all commercial comparison-shopping services anyway, since I figure they sell priority listings.

Enter the internets: Alf recently pointed to a dynamic version of Google's custom search, and Nature recently published a tech feature on antibodies -- including a nice long table of suppliers, complete with websites.

So for now, here's the crude version: I just jammed both those things together onto a single page: Google Custom Antibody Search.

What I'd like to do, eventually, is to turn the thing into a communal resource. This will mean finding a way to make it quick and easy for anyone to add a new suppliers' website. I could put it on a wiki somewhere, but I'd like to be able to offer a one-click way for people to contribute... maybe a one-click Simpy button with a tag like "AbSupplier", a way to produce a non-redundant subset of the links so tagged, and then a way to write those links back out to the custom search page...

Anyway, there it is. I don't even know for sure that it will be useful -- I'll try it myself at work, and see. Feel free to leave a comment here suggesting ways I could improve it, or just take the idea and build the thing properly yourself.


... wait, that's not a mashup, is it? If I got it working with Simpy or something, then it'd be a mashup. Poo.