It is always a thrill and a privilege to share our customers' success stories with you, particularly when they feature ABclonal's products in their research publications. Over the past year, we have seen many citations of our reagents in multiple journals, showcasing the partnership ABclonal maintains as a trusted lab partner across a wide range of disciplines. In this entry, we will highlight some of the catalog and custom antibody products our valued customers used to generate recent publication-quality research that adds to our collective understanding of biology!

As the new year gets going, most people have already set some New Year's resolutions (here's some if you're of the science-y academic ilk) and chief among these is usually to exercise more and lose that holiday weight after the mounds of cookies and pie. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the latest Science Magazine Breakthrough of the Year recognizes GLP-1 drugs, which have been shown not only to be effective in managing diabetes, but also has significant impact on weight loss. The demand for these drugs has skyrocketed over the last few years as the word of their efficacy has spread, leading to supply chain issues that could adversely affect diabetes patients dependent on the medications. As the various GLP-1 drugs remain in short supply, it seems a good time to explore these drugs, their potential contributions to global human health, and what can be done to ensure they are accessible to those who need them most.

My wife put her studies on hold while I completed my PhD in cancer biology to take care of our son, but is now on the verge of getting her art history degree! One of her current classes is discussing the role of technology in art, and she stumbled across this older article that addresses the field of "bio-art," or art that represents a crossover between art and the biological sciences. I never really considered this as a contemporary art form, but I guess, separate from the illustrators or photographers who produce content for textbooks and science magazines, as well as the graphic designers who make the signal transduction diagrams and informational graphics for our references, bioscience has advanced to a point where we can manipulate cells in culture and living organisms to produce works of art that could be easily recognizable or more abstract. Since we are talking about living tissues being employed in the display of art, there are ethical considerations in play that we will explore in this article.

In 2022, Science Magazine awarded their Science Breakthrough of the Year to the NASA JW Space Telescope. In the time since, we have been mesmerized by the many new picture of our vast cosmos. Since ancient humans gazed up into the stars, we have always wondered what was out there in the universe, and we can find our fascination with the final frontier in our mythology, both from ages past and in contemporary science fiction. As humanity looks to return to the moon and establish further presence on Mars and beyond, let's take a look at our search for extraterrestrial life, if it is out there...or should I say, it's most likely out there!

The dream of biomedical researchers is to fine-tune their therapeutics to precisely target the specific illness or pathogen affecting their patient. Ever since Nobel laureate and oft-quoted father of immunology, Paul Ehrlich, coined the term “magic bullet,” medical science has marched towards more personalized drugs that target key molecules that cause diseases including cancer. ¹ We find ourselves now, over a century later, in an exciting era of discovery that has produced many antibody drug conjugates (ADC) designed to precisely target the diseased cells and not healthy cells. ADC uses this strategy to take advantage of the specificity of antibodies while delivering a covalently linked cytotoxic payload directly to diseased tissues to reduce the multitudes of side effects and toxicity. ^{2, 3} As basic research identifies more targets and antibody engineering procedures improve, the range of antitumor and anti-disease weapons may seem limitless. 

I am immensely proud of being an alumnus of the University of California at Berkeley, where I was able to get a world class education and have opportunities to meet with and learn from superb professors, some of whom have since earned Nobel Prizes. Those were some of the most fun years of my life and I also appreciated the beautiful, sprawling campus with lots of fantastic architecture and wide-open green spaces to lounge around on and play catch with my friend every now and then. It is mere coincidence that the day this article published is also Marian Koshland's birthday, and it got me thinking about Koshland Hall, one of the newer (now old, because so am I) buildings when I started college, and which Koshland it was actually named after.