Parkinson's Disease (PD) remains the second-most common neurodegenerative disorder behind Alzheimer's Disease, and the incidence of patients being diagnosed with PD will only rise as we all get older. With this in mind, much personnel and resources are dedicated to discovering more about this disease and to develop better treatments and management strategies to improve the livelihoods of those afflicted with PD. April is Parkinson's Awareness Month, and this is a perfect time for us not only to raise funds and awareness to help PD patients, but also to learn about how companies like ABclonal can help accelerate the research behind PD onset and progression. Here, we highlight studies using ABclonal products that were published within the past year that add new insights into Parkinson's research.

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!

I recall having to make hundreds of custom peptides, and even though we used an automated peptide synthesizer rather than doing it by hand like another lab in the building, making a dozen peptides at a time still took hours on the machine and then another couple days for the purification and lyophilization processes. My mentor and I briefly joked about using bacteria and a polycistronic construct to just have the little guys use their ribosomes to do it for us, but the purification process probably would have been impractical. This does make me appreciate the wonders of natural biosynthetic machinery, and I promise there is a point here because we still use animal hosts to initially produce antibodies. Today, let's explore the process by which most commercial and custom antibodies are still produced, including here at ABclonal!

As a scientist (or at least, a guy who likes science and works for a bioscience-oriented company), I am invested in the power of scientific research in improving the quality of human life across all arenas. It is particularly gratifying when our customers, who are all primarily research scientists, derive direct benefit from ABclonal's products in their published research. In this case, our business development director had a customer recently defend her thesis based on a publication that used several ABclonal catalog antibodies. I enjoyed reading her group's article that may lead to more effective treatment strategies for diabetes patients going forward, so let's get to it.

With the holiday season upon us, it is a time to relax and be among loved ones again as we recharge for the push into the new year. Along the way, we have learned quite a bit about medical advances and new discoveries into life processes, information that will be used to drive the next stages of innovation. One of the great perks of having been in an academic setting was the constant immersion in ideas and collaboration, but even though some of us are no longer connected directly to academia, the vast interconnectivity provided by the internet means that we are never too far away from good information that could teach us something new and exciting.

Perhaps we only think of zinc as the extra element in our coins to keep manufacturing costs down, or as that random clip from the Simpsons about a world without zinc. Aside from thinking it is a wacky sounding word (I did look up the etymology and it is rather appropriate!), we just don’t consider zinc as being all that important. Once the pandemic hit, though, I noted that Costco was marketing their zinc supplements a lot more, and after doing some extra research, I bought some to add to my diet.