News August 2026
We add recombinant forms of three of our most popular mouse antibodies, MCA-1B7 to Fox3/NeuN, MCA-4H2 to tyrosine hydroxylase and MCA-DA2 to the neurofilament light chain NF-L. These three reagents are very well characterized and have been used in many peer reviewed publications. However many leading journals now prefer scientists to use recombinant forms of monoclonal antibodies if they are available, so we cloned and sequenced these three clones allowing us to generate MRA-1B7, MRA-2H2 and MRA-DA2 respectively. We show that these three reagents preserve all of the properties of the original antibodies but are now essentially immortal reagents. Note that we have also expressed the MCA-1B7 Fox3/NeuN antibody in a recombinant form with a rabbit IgG backbone, RRA-1B7, extending the versatility of this useful reagent.
News June 2026
We have gone recombinant! Our most useful, widely used and best cited mouse monoclonal antibodies have now been cloned, sequenced and expressed In Vitro, meaning that they are now essentially immortal. Some of the highest impact journals now prefer scientists to use recombinant antibodies if they available to optimize experimental reproducibility, see for example here and here. We have cloned, sequenced and expressed the top 20 EnCor mouse monoclonal antibodies and will market them in the recombinant form in the near future. We also generated recombinant forms of three of our most widely used antibodies now with rabbit IgG backbones to enhance their versatility. These are a rabbit monoclonal to NeuN/FOX3 RRA-1B7 and two rabbit monoclonals to c-FOS, RRA-2H2 and RRA-1B62. The RRA-1B7 antibody inherits the extensive data we have for the original mouse reagent including the epitope, kinetic properties, species cross reactivity and utility for WB, IF, ICC and IHC, making it the best characterized NeuN/FOX3 reagent available. The RRA-1B62 antibody, like the original MCA-1B62, was developed to be particularly insensitive to formalin fixation and so works well on formalin fixed paraffin embedded histological sections. The MCA-2H2 clone has become very widely used but is less robust on heavily fixed material for IHC. We have extensively tested all three antibodies and they function exactly like the originals. These novel rabbit monoclonal antibodies will be a particularly useful for ultra reliable application on mouse tissues where endogenous mouse IgG make technical problems.
We are well known for the quality of our antibodies and, using them, the resulting fluorescent images. A few years ago we took some sample stained microscope slides to the annual Society for Neuroscience Meeting and took them by various microscope vendors. It is fair to say that they were extremely impressed and so we have been supplying them to most major microscope companies for the last few years. So we have decided to make them generally available from our website. They can used to optimize the performance of fluorescence, confocal and multiphoton microscopes or for general teaching purposes. The slides use a collection of EnCor primary antibodies made in different species, typically mouse, rabbit, chicken and goat which are each specifically detected with appropriate species specific secondary reagents coupled to some combination of 488nm, 561nm, 594nm, 640nm and 750nm wavelengths. We also utilize the DNA fluorescent dye DAPI which emits at a 405nm wavelength and reveals cell nuclei. Here is an example of a video, now posted on Youtube, showing stained of HeLa cells with 5 channels here, in this case revealing microtubules with β-tubulin antibody (MCA-1B12), nucleoli with fibrillarin antibody (RPCA-Fib), mitochondria with HSP60 antibody (CPCA-HSP60), all from EnCor. We also revealed nuclear DNA with DAPI and microfilaments with fluorescent phalloidin. We decided to market similar preparations of 3T3 cells as shipping of human derived cells across national boundaries can be problematic. Such slides will be available shortly.
March 2026 News
We publish another report concerning the breakdown products of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) which are released into blood and CSF following a variety of CNS damage and disese states, Wanner et al. BioRκiv 2025. The peer reviewed version of the report has been accepted for publication in the journal Acta Neuropathologica Communications, and will be available for free download shortly. These fragments are generated following various forms of neurodegeneration. Detection of them in blood and CSF potentially gives additional information about prognosis and progression of a variety of neurodegernative diseases in which astrocytes become compromised. The paper includes detailed epitope mapping of three EnCor mouse monoclonal antibodies to GFAP, MCA-5C10, MCA-3E10 and MCA-2A5.
We also release a new mouse monoclonal antibody to Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). MCA-6H12. We demostrate that this antibody works well for western blotting, immunofluoresence, on formalin fixed floating sections and on paraffin embedded formalin fixed tissues from rodents transgenically expressing GFP. We have also defined the MCA-6H12 epitope and showed that the antibody binds common variants of GFP and does not cross reacrt with TdTomato or mCherry.
