Our antibodies to the immediate early gene product c-FOS are very widely used as sold by EnCor and by the very many companies that resell our reagents. When cells become activated by growth factors, neurotransmitters, damage or stress a common response is to rapidly and transiently activate the expression of several genes, the best known being c-FOS, The c-FOS protein is a transcriptional regulator which activates the expression of many other genes. Following stimulation levels of c-FOS rapidly increase and then rapidly decline, so that cells expressing large amounts of c-FOS are in the process of activating downstream gene expression. We have generated two widely used antibodies to c-FOS, mouse monoclonal MCA-2H2 and rabbit polyclonal RPCA-c-FOS. More recently we have developed a novel mouse monoclonal antibody MCA-1B62 designed specifically to work well on floating sections. All three antibodies work well on western blots and detect heavy expression of c-FOS in activated cultured human cells.

     Many years ago Mullen et al. 1992 described a mouse monoclonal antibody, named A60, which stained the vast majority of neurons, mostly in the nucleus but spreading to the proximal cytoplasm in certain cells. They named the protein to which the antibody bound "NeuN" for neuronal nuclei. The antibody became widely used even though the identity of the NeuN protein was unknown for many years. Finally KIm et al. 2009 showed that NeuN was actually FOX3, a neuron specific RNA binding protein. We made a panel of high quality FOX3/NeuN antibodies in mouse, rabbit, chicken and goat. Our antibodies are epitope mapped and we document that our monoclonal antibody MCA-1B7 binds FOX3/NeuN with greater affinity and has a higher titre than A60. The antibody is widely used see Google Scholar search and is also considerably cheaper than other alternatives.

      Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein (GFAP) is an intermediate or 10nm filament subunit and is expressed in mature astrocytes, certain radial glia, non-myelinating Schwann cells and neural stem cells. Our chicken antibody is very widely used especially to visualize astrocytic cells in cell culture and in tissue sections, see Google Scholar search for CPCA-GFAP.. There is also considerable interest in GFAP as a biomarker of neurodegeneration. We have generated a panel of epitope mapped mouse monoclonal antibodies and a panel of polyclonal antibodies made in rabbit, chicken and goat.

      Microtubule associated protein 2 (MAP2) is an abundant and well studied protein heavily expressed only in neuronal perikarya and dendrites but not axons. Several gene products from the single mammalian MAP2 gene produce smaller ~70kDa forms MAP2C and D as visualized on SDS-PAGE. Larger forms, MAP2A and B appear as ~250kDa bands on SDS-PAGE. The larger forms include the sequence of the smaller forms plus a large protein insert which produces the so-called "projection domain" which can be seen in the electron microscope as fine filaments projecting form the side of neuronal microtubules. Early in neuronal development only MAPC and D are expressed while later in development the MAP2A and B forms become expressed in bulk. We have generated a panel of high quality antibodies made in mouse, chicken, rabbit and goat with defined specificities to these various MAP2 isoforms.

      Our research program developed a series of antibodies specific for proteolysed forms of the neurofilament light chain (NF-L), a major protein of axons. These antibodies, such as MCA-6H63, MCA-1D44 and RPCA-NF-L-Degen are unique reagents for the identification and visualization of damaged and degenerating axons. The epitopes for these antibodies are embedded in assembled neurofilaments but not in partially degraded material and they therefore recognize only degenerating and degenerated axons. We also have antibodies which bind to proteolytically sensitive sites on neurofilaments which are rapidly destroyed on axonal degeneration. These antibodies, for example our MCA-DA2 and RPCA-NF-L-ct, therefore only only label healthy axons.

      We have documented that our mouse monoclonal antibody to TDP43 works well for western blots and for IF, ICC and IHC of human and rodent material. We have also measured the kinetic properties of this antibody and mapped the epitope to a region immediatly C-terminal to the second RNA binding domain and immediately N-terminal to the peptide segment known to associate with annexin a11 in FTLD-TDP43 type C, see Arseni et al. Nature 2024.

      Tyrosine hydroxylase is a major cytoplasmic enzyme of chatecholaminergic neurons. High quality antiubodies to this important enzyme are therefore useful for studies of these important cells. Our antibodies are of very high quality and work well for western blotting, IF, ICC and IHC on human and rodent tissues. We also document the use of two of these antibodies in an ELISA assay now published in peer reviewed form, see here.