Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are used as immunotherapeutics to treat cancer and other diseases, and either aim to induce target cell destruction or immune cell activation. After binding to their cognate antigens, mAbs engage Fc gamma receptor  (FcγR), localised on the surface of the Immune cells, and identified by many research groups as regulator of mAbs activity. To help researchers working on immunotherapeutic mAbs development, BPS Bioscience have developed a new CHO K1 cell line stably expressing full length human FcGR2B.

With their polycationic properties, polyamine organic compounds are involved in various biological functions (DNA-RNA interaction, gene expression…), and can also be considered as cancer marker.

In this post, I’m pleased to introduce the first intra-cellular polyamine imaging reagent which works without any pre-treatment or cell lysis. This innovative reagent can be used for live cells, thus making it suitable for detection or semi-quantitative analysis of intra-cellular polyamines.

As is well known, the actin cytoskeleton is a highly dynamic structure, involved in a large number of cellular processes, including muscle contraction, lamellopodial extrusion, cell locomotion, cytokinesis, intracellular transport and many more. Under the tight regulation of more than 50 actin binding proteins (ABPs) and in response to a wide variety of internal and external stimuli, the morphology of the actin cytoskeleton changes rapidly.

For more than 20 years now, Cytoskeleton Inc. has provided a large selection of robust and user friendly solutions (pure and active actin proteins/Biochemical assays and actin staining probes..) which have helped many researchers to solve fundamental questions in cell signalling, cytoskeleton and actin research fields.

As is already known, multiple families of small GTPases (Ras, Arf and Rho families) make up the Ras GTPase superfamily. Due to their role as molecular switches in cell signalling (active GTP-bound state vs inactive GDP-bound states) and in many other cellular responses (cytoskeletal reorganization, regulation of transcription, apoptosis…), these small GTPases are the subject of intense investigation to try to understand the mechanisms that regulate activation and inactivation of this proteins.

In this post, I invite you to discover a revolutionary way to study these cell signalling events by quantifying the level of active small GTPases in your experimental model.