Lipodystrophies are disorders characterized by complete or selective loss of adipose tissue from various regions of the body. They might lead to severe metabolic disorders. The development of reliable cellular experimental models mimicking such diseases in vitro is extremely challenging (1). One of the main hurdle in the design of such in vitro cellular models is the access to reliable sources of well-qualified primary cells and the identification of optimal cell culture conditions.

To date, detecting changes in the ubiquitylation of specific substrate proteins in response to external stimuli, e.g. stress, cytokine exposure, drug candidate treatment, etc., has been a long, labor-intensive process involving immunoprecipitation followed by gel electrophoresis and Western blot analysis.  This method is low through-put, resource intensive, and only semi-quantitative at best.

ELISA like method to measure all ubiquitinated proteins in cell lysates

Fig. 1.: Decrease in LDLR ubiquitylation following treatment of transfected cells with an IDOL inhibitor.

To enable researchers to avoid the above mentioned limitations, LifeSensors has developed the UbiQuantTM S kit as a facile, robust, and quantitative alternative to IP/WB analysis.