January 2021 News

      We release novel antibodies to one of the CasΦ, a.k.a. Cas-12j, family of enzymes. These are newly described and exceptionally compact enzymes of great potential utility in gene editing by CRISPR. Recent ecosystem and microbiome DNA sequencing and assembly characterized numerous whole genomes of “huge phages” or megaphages, see Al-Shayeb et al. Nature 578:425-431 (2020). These phages have much larger genomes than those of well studies bacteriophages such as phage-λ and members of this family are apparently ubiquitously found in all microbiomes and ecosystems. Interestingly the genomes may include genes which encode novel CRISPR associated or Cas enzymes. The lab of recent Nobel prize winner Professor Jennifer Doudna further characterized some of these megaphage Cas enzymes and showed that they could be used to perform CRISPR but had the significant advantage that they were much smaller in molecular size than typical Cas9 and Cas12 enzymes such as those from S. pyogenes and S. aureus, see Pausch et al. Science 369:333-337 (2020). The amino acid sequence of several of these enzymes was published and the group studied was named CasΦ or Cas12j. The small relative size of CasΦ enzymes leaves more room for other nucleic acid sequences in AAV and other viral vectors which typically have a limited DNA capacity. We made a mouse monoclonal and a rabbit polyclonal to one of these enzymes, CasΦ-2, MCA-5F95 and RPCA-Cas12J respectively. These can be used verify correct expression of CasΦ-2 protein in CRISPR experiments.
      We have also made a novel, high quality and very high titer rabbit polyclonal antibody to microtubule associated protein 2 (MAP2), RPCA-MAP2. Antibodies to MAP2 are excellent markers of neuronal dendrites and perikarya and are also useful in developmental studies. This new antibody was made against recombinant forms of the entire MAP2 projection domain using a mixture of our three human MAP2 projection domain constructs and works very well on tissues of transgenic and wild type rodents at dilutions of 1:10,000. It is therefore a very cost effective reagent for routine neuronal identification in cell cultures and tissue sections.