I'm working with cancer cell and would like to know about the presence of some proteins in my medium like chemokines, cytokines and others.
The easiest and also most convenient way to quantify chemokines, cytokines and so on, is the good old ELISA. You will find a lot of different kits for almost every protein you like.
You could also utilize spectroscopical methods, e.g. near-infrared (NIR) absorbance spectroscopy. Or chromatographical methods, like HPLC. But these methods would need quite a high level of experience in the method of choice.
Therefore, I would highly recommend the classical Sandwich-ELISA method. I am using kits from eBioscience, because they have a very good cost-performance ratio. But take care of the sensitivity you need.
Danielle, why not consider going over to weaning your cells into defined serum-free medium? Then you would be able to add in whatever was of interest to your work and have the comfort of knowing that there would not be batch to batch variations each time you changed the source/supplier of FCS.
Immune assays in general employing specific antibodies:
ELISA (I think closest to what you meant as gold standard, if there is such a thing) is most common for measuring secreted cytokines or chemokines.
Semi-quantitative assays can employ:
Intracellular cytokines/chemokines and also the correlating receptors can be tested with all the above suggestions: western blots, ELISA (for lysed cells), FACS (intracellular staining) etc.
You can find kits testing multiple cytokine/chemokine arrays, utilizing flow cytometry (FACS); dot plots membranes, or even ELISA plates.
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