I doubt that any one lab has enough experience with different pronase products to say that a particular pronase product is “best”. We have seen that even different lots of the same product from the same company can give very different results. Likewise, it’s unlikely any one lab has tried more than 2 or 3 pronase procedures, so the best procedure is definitely open to debate. When our lab first experimented with pronase, we initially copied procedures from two other labs, but found that their pronase procedures (at least in our execution of them using our lab’s pronase), had little if any effect on detection of “autoantibodies”. Our current procedure uses a much higher concentration of pronase than most published references.
I won’t claim that our lab has the best pronase or the best pronase procedure, but we like it enough that we always use it in our flow crossmatches, whereas we disliked other pronase procedures so much that we refused to use pronase until we came up with a better method. Our procedure can be found in the ASHI Quarterly, second quarter 2008, page 42.
