April 2021 News
We publish another collaboration between scientists at the University of Florida and EnCor, “TNF increases tyrosine hydroxylase expression in human monocytes” by Madison et al., BioRΧiv 10.1101/2021.04.13.439627v1, It describes in detail an ELISA developed using EnCor antibodies which can be used for quantitation of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) levels in a variety of experimental and clinical contexts. The specific antibodies used are our mouse monoclonal antibody MCA-4H2 and our rabbit polyclonal RPCA-TH. They also used our chicken polyclonal to the cell division marker Ki67 CPCA-Ki67. Previously the same group showed that TH levels were detectable in blood cells of healthy control and Parkinson’s patients and that the levels detected in Parkinson’s patients were significantly higher, a potential very significant finding.
We have been very interested in recent studies of NF-L, neurofilament light, as a biomarker of neuronal damage and degeneration. Much of the recent work has been performed with the excellent Uman NF-Light Assay. The epitopes recognized by the two antibodies used in this assay are not known, and so we have been working to fully characterize them. As part of this work we generated a codon optimized cDNA designed to express amino acids 256-400 of the α-helical rod region of human neurofilament NF-L, specifically the Coil 2a and Coil 2b regions. Our full length recombinant human NF-L protein Prot-r-NF-L is widely used as a protein standard in ELISA, Simoa and other kinds of antibody based assays for NF-L detection, including the Uman assay. Our new truncated product, Prot-r-NF-L-rct, contains the epitopes for both the capture and detect NF-L monoclonal antibodies used in the Uman NF-Light assay and also the epitope for our mouse NF-L monoclonal MCA-1B11. This product may therefore be a more convenient protein standard for use with the Uman and similar NF-L assays, and our new data suggests that MCA-1B11 may form the basis of further NF-L assays.
We also updated our product data for several of our recombinant proteins including mCherry Prot-r-mCherry and GFP Prot-r-acGFP.
