Antibody News

By Jody Bonnevier, PhD.

Flow cytometry: A Challenging Interdisciplinary Application

Flow cytometry has long been the cell analysis method of choice for immunologists, however more and more disciplines have recognized its powerful and flexible capabilities, and want to harness the advantages of this multiparameter single-cell analytical tool. Nowadays, the benefits of flow cytometry for cell phenotyping extend from basic to clinical research and diagnostic applications as well as to drug discovery and development.

In basic research, the same flow cytometry techniques used to phenotype T cell subsets can be applied to defining protein...

By Christina Towers, PhD.

Autophagy is highly conserved and tightly regulated process that all cell types use to recycle nutrients, particularly in the instance of stress¹. As a result, even small changes in signaling pathways, gene expression, or drug treatments can alter autophagy. If you stumble into the field of autophagy by happenstance and hypothesize a change in autophagy with your favorite cell manipulation of choice, you probably read a handful of publications and came to the conclusion that you should assay LC3 levels to test this hypothesis. In fact, LC3 expression can be a good readout for autophagy, but researchers should be...

By Jamshed Arslan Pharm.D.

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the most common type of lung cancer. NSCLC cells show increased expression of HIF-1alpha and HIF-2 alpha, which help cells overcome hypoxia. However, NSCLC samples have shown decreased mRNA levels of HIF-2 alpha-encoding gene called EPAS1. The mechanism of downregulation of EPAS1 transcription in NSCLC is unknown. A team of researchers from various institutes in Shanghai and Yangzhou, China, suspected transcriptional inactivation through DNA...

By Christina Towers, PhD.

Autophagy is a cellular recycling process and most often a pro-survival mechanism that regulates cellular homeostasis. On the contrary, apoptosis is an extensively conserved and elaborate programmed cell death process, and it is well established that the two processes are often opposing forces within the cell. Despite the agreed upon notion that autophagy can protect cells from apoptosis, the mechanistic link has yet to be elucidated. This is especially important given the 60 (and growing) number of clinical trials that are currently underway inhibiting autophagy in cancer in combination with other chemotherapies and targeted therapeutics.

The field is hopeful...

By Christina Towers, PhD.

In the last 20 years, epigenetic regulation has become front and center for almost all fields of biology and its role in diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration are being heavily studied. Epigenetics can be defined as a change in phenotype without a change in genotype that is caused by remodeling the chromatin landscape and is often mediated by changes in histone marks, like methylation, acetylation, phosphorylation, SUMOylation, ubiquitination, and glycosylation to name a few. The cellular recycling process of autophagy is among one of the many processes...

By Yoskaly Lazo-Fernandez, PhD

Introduction

Evidence has accumulated recently indicating that common cancer therapies might stimulate metastasis in a significant number of cancer patients¹. In fact, neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) drugs, which are administered preoperatively as a first line of treatment, have been associated with increased infiltration of endothelial progenitor cells and macrophages in primary tumors, resulting in higher angiogenesis and tumor regrowth². Mechanisms by which these cellular injury responses induce metastasis, both in preclinical in vivo models, and in human...

By Christina Towers, PhD.

Parkinson's disease is a debilitating neurodegenerative condition defined by the accumulation of alpha-synuclein-containing (alpha-SYN) intra-cytoplasmic inclusions, called Lewy bodies. The protein degradative processes of autophagy, and most specifically chaperone mediated autophagy and mitophagy, play an important protective role against this disease by targeting neurotoxins for lysosomal mediated degradation¹. Alpha-SYN neurotoxins most commonly affect neurons, but they can also...

By Jamshed Arslan Pharm.D.

Motor neurons control our ability to speak, walk, swallow, and even, breath. People with a motor neuron disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) cannot perform these primal functions optimally. A point mutation (P56S) in VAMP associated protein isoform B (VAPB), a protein associated with the membrane around the endoplasmic reticulum, causes late-onset familial ALS8 by prompting VAPB to aggregate and lose its job of preventing buildup of abnormal proteins. To study ALS8, C. elegans is one of the animals of choice due to its simple neurophysiology: a single worm has only 302 neurons and 113 of them are...

By Colin O'Neill, 2018 Novus Intern

The specificity and affinity of an antibody for its target protein—and only its target is valued as an indicator of its experimental reliability. The frustrating ability of an antibody to bind to multiple proteins has prompted a reproducibility crisis in the life science community. Specifically, if an antibody varies in specificity between batches, attempts to reproduce significant findings with that antibody may fail. With samples, time, and funding at stake, scientists have developed novel validation techniques to ensure antibodies solely bind to their intended targets to avoid false positives and ambiguous results. Nature's 2015 article...

By Jamshed Arslan Pharm.D.

Natural killer (NK) cells are lymphocytes of the innate immune system that were first discovered for their “natural” ability to kill cancer cells. To use NK cells as anti-cancer therapy, they are co-cultured with feeder cells that are sensitive to attack by NK cells. The killing of feeder cells in turn generates highly efficient tumor-killing NK cells. However, a major challenge in using these ex vivo expanded NK cells as anti-cancer therapy is the highly immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, partly because the cancer cells, myeloid derived suppressor cells and other stromal cells produce excessive amounts of...

By Christina Towers, PhD.

Autophagy is a critical cellular process used by most cells in the body to recycle nutrients and prevent harmful buildup of damaged proteins. It is particularly important in the brain, where a handful of pathologies have been linked to autophagy dysregulation. Conditional neuronal knock out of the core autophagy gene, ATG7, results in viable mice that eventually succumb to neurodegeneration accompanied by an accumulation of ubiquitin protein aggregates^{1, 2}. Likewise, decreased levels of functional autophagy have been linked to the three most common neurodegenerative diseases including...

By Jamshed Arslan Pharm.D.

Glioblastoma is an aggressive type of cancer that forms from the star-shaped glial cells of the central nervous system, called astrocytes. Intriguingly, several genes linked to glioblastomas, including the gene for the tumor suppressor Von Hippel-Lindau protein (VHL), do not exhibit mutations. VHL prevents tumorigenesis by binding and modulating the function of hypoxia-inducible factor HIF-1 alpha and hydroxylated serine-threonine kinase Akt. Developmental processes that maintain cells in a...