Glycocalyx, literally meaning ‘sugar coat’, is an extracellular polymeric coating surrounding many prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells that consists of glycoproteins, glycolipids, proteoglycans and glycosaminoglycans. The constituents of the glycocalyx play an important role in the process of cell signaling, virus transfection, and immunity and glycosylation status is important in processes such as inflammation and tumour microenvironment. However, the range of detection tools available for glycobiology research is quite limited, and in most cases, studies aimed at characterising glycosylation patterns have to be done with HPLC using home-based methods.

This week, the 13th European ISSX (International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics) meeting is taking place in Glasgow (Scotland) at the University of Strathclyde.

The meeting brings scientists together during courses, keynote sessions, poster sessions and much more.

One of this blog’s authors, Jean-François, is attending as Cells & ADME-Tox specialist at tebu-bio.

If you’re there (or know anyone that is…) stop by booth 102 to say hello!

 Follow live tweets with #ISSX

A series of publications (1, 2) in the past months has raised the never-ending debate on commercial antibodies and their validity in a given experiment. At tebu-bio, having sold antibodies for more than 40 years, we are well aware that not all antibodies fit all applications, and always strive to find the best antibody for a given experiment.

In collaboration with the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Rockland Inc. has developed and validated a highly specific toolkit to analyze PARP1 in a panel of control and siRNA knockdown cell lysates by multiple immunoassays.