September 2025 News
We will be at the Society for Neuroscience; annual meeting in the convention center of San Diego 15th-19th of November. This is the major international meeting for neuroscientists and we have been going every year since 2013. This year we will be at booth 700, easily remembered as it is the number directly after 699. As usual we will be giving out posters, flashlights, pens and other cool swag objects.
We also release new antibodies. MCA-1H103 is an antibody to phosphorylated MAPτ, a.k.a. MAPT or simply τ or tau, a major protein expressed heavily in neurons and certain glia. The antibody binds only forms of τ phosphorylated on threonine 205 and our studies suggest that this site is constitutively phosphorylated in vivo. We also release MCA-5H112, a new mouse monoclonal made against the cryptic epitopes on neurofilament light chain, a.k.a. NF-L. The antibody is extremely well characterized and we show that it binds to a region of NF-L similar to the binding site of antibody UD1, a.k.a. 47.3, the key capture reagent in the Uman Diagnostics NF-LIGHT™ ELISA assay and the Quanterix SIMOA™ NF-L assay.
July 2025 News
A recent very impressive paper in Science Advances describes a detailed 3D map of the entire mouse brain using triple antibody labelling with a collection of cell type and cell structure specific antibodies, this data being correlated with high resolution MRI. The authors impregnated the brains fully with the antibodies and imaged them with light sheet microscopy using procedures developed by LifeCanvas. The authors made use of three of EnCor's mouse antibodies, our FOX3/NeuN MCA-1B7, our myelin basic protein antibody MCA-7G7 and one of our our NF-H antibodies, apparently MCA-NAP4.
We have generated a novel rabbit polyclonal antibody to neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS, NOS1), RPCA-NOS1. NOS1 is a brain enzyme which reacts with the amino acid arginine to generate the important signaling molecule and gas nitric oxide (NO). NO can rapidly diffuse through tissues as it easily passes cytoplasm and cellular membranes. NO activates guanylate cyclase which generates cyclic GMP which in turn activates many other molecules. NO is involved in controlling blood vessel diameter and hence blood flow and pressure in the CNS. NO also has rolls in memory formation, the regulation of synaptic transmission and S-nitrosylation of proteins. Our antibody was made against the C-terminal peptide of human nNOS and we document that it works well on human, rat and mouse tissues for western blotting, IF, ICC and IHC.
A new collaborative paper between EnCor scientists and the University of Florida just appeared in the prestigious and rigorously peer-reviewed journal Experimental Neurology. The paper making use of one of our novel Degenotag™ reagents, specifically our epitope mapped NF-L monoclonal MCA-6H63, which detects forms of NF-L only accessible after neurodegeneration. See Fusco et al. "Serum evaluation of NFL correlates with histological identification of degenerating axons", Exp. Neurol. 23:392:115360 (2025). Finally our CEO and founder, Gerry Shaw, gave a presentation on this and some of our other recent research at the 5th International Research Conference on Neurodegenerative Disease, IRCND2025.
April 2025 News
TdTomato is a widely used fluorescent protein which is typically expressed fused with a protein of interest, allowing the fusion partner to be visualized in a variety of experimental contexts. The prototype for this family is Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) originally isolated from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria but homologues have now been found in many species. GFP and several other fluorescent proteins were engineered in the labs of Roger Y. Tsein and others to produce a wide variety of novel reagents with enhanced and/or altered fluorescence properties and/or altered protein binding properties. Tomato was developed from DsRed, a protein originally found in a Discosoma coral. GFP and the other fluorescent proteins are all based on a compact 11 strand β-barrel structure of about 27kDa molecular size. TdTomato contains two of these fluorescent moieties in tandem, which is what the "td" refers to. This was done to increase the fluorescence emission of tdTomato fusion proteins. The emission of tdTomato peaks at 580nm which is red to human eyes, explaining the "Tomato" part of the name. We release a new monoclonal antibody raised against recombinant tdTomato, MCA-6F12. This antibody can be used to verify the expression of tdTomato fusion proteins by western blotting and to amplify the tdTomato signal in transfected and transduced cells in sectioned material. TdTomato is closely related to mCherry, also derived from DsRed. Alignment of the protein sequences of the two with Clustal Omega gives an identity score of 86.64%. We document that MCA-6F12 also recognizes mCherry and have localized the MCA-6F12 epitope to amino acids 151-170 of mCherry and 147-166 of tdTomato.
