Hello! Do you know some good antibodies, suitable for IFL, for differently staining the M2 and M2 microglia phenotypes in rat tissue? I am searching for antibodies specific for RAT because all the Abs I have tried were good for mouse brain, but gave aspecific or no signals in rat brain.
Thank you!
As far as I’m aware, there are no antibodies specific to an M1 or M2 phenotype. Most often, the phenotype is assigned based on the expression profile of the microglia (i.e. determined using qPCR/RNA seq etc.).
The validity of the rigid M1/M2a/M2b characterisation of microglia has also been questioned (https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4338).
Hi Dominic, thank you for answer me! I know that is not easy to discriminate between M2 and M1 phenotype without looking at the expression profile, but I need to perform an easy experiment on microglia morphology and marker expression, based on immunofluorescent reactions. Something as what has been done in this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3469.
Unfortunately, I am not able to find good antibodies specific for rat tissue, the only antibodies I have work really well in mouse brain. But I need to find some good Ab (e.g. Arg-1, CD206, CD68, YM1) suitable for rat.
We are using CD68 from BioRad in rat brain tissue and it has a good stain, but we dont have any antibody to distinguish the macroglial subpopulation. I hope this information will be useful.
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