The BICC helped with the assessment of aSyn antibodies

Antibodies that recognize the phosphorylated serine residue 129 of the alpha-synuclein (aSyn) protein have emerged as the primary tools to investigate, monitor, and quantify aSyn pathology in the brain and peripheral tissues of patients with Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. The group of Professor Hilal Lashuel made an in-depth investigation regarding the specificity and sensitivity of several commercially available and in-house produced antibodies, and provided recommendations regarding the characterization of antibodies used in research and clinical studies to improve confidence in, and repeatability of, the results. The BICC contributed to this study by performing a bioinformatics analysis using data available in the reference databases like UniProtKB to identify proteins that could also cross-react with aSyn-antibodies and hence give rise to false positive results.