Dopamie receptors are situated mainly in the Substantia Nigra(SN) in the basis of the brain. These receptors i.e. their function is very important in neuroimmunology and especialy in autoimmune reactions in the brain. The most important functions of these receptors is in the development of Parkisonş disease. D2 receptors are especialy interesting from psychological aspect, while D1 preferentially for motor functions of the brain. I believe that in the periphery nerve system they are also interesting not only in flow cytometry but also for confocal microscopy and atomic microscopy as well.

Dear Vanessa, great point! I'd strongly recommend to think about monoclonal antibodies directed towards ALL the five DR, and also please consider HUMAN receptors, which will benefit a lot all the researchers interested in DA pathways in immune cells. Provided that they were available (for human DR), we would like to test them immediately in our models, wehre their performance could be compared with that of the presently available polyclonal antibodies. Is anyone interested in starting a collaborative project?

Dear Marco, I mainly work with mouse PD models and the antibodies available are really bad, that is why I have been talking with BD, they are open to "us the scientist" suggesting they expand their repertoire in this direction. I am sure they will also be interested in producing for human detection. I have been looking for someone to look in PD patients T cells in serum and see if our observations are applicable to humans so I would love to find a common point to start testing the antibodies. Anybody else?

It's exactly waht we are doing right now (and over the last year)

DR antibodies for flow cytometry would be fantastic. The antibodies available now are not good and no one in the pharmacology community believes any data I present based on antibodies - they all demand to see RNA, which is not helpful when working on differences in receptor accessibility and surface expression. I work on the effects of dopamine on primary human macrophages, and would be thrilled to be able to test out FACS antibodies on these cells and others isolated from human PBMC.

In our work we have found that the variability in dopamine response between individuals is very high. So we have tried to find ways to assess the differences in dopamine receptor expression between individuals, but without FACS there is not a good way to do this - I cannot get enough cells to reasonably do membrane specific western blots with multiple conditions and RNA does not directly tell you about protein expression levels. We have tried several other antibodies which claim to work for flow and they are not good options, not only requiring 2-step staining (making it difficult to accurately differentiate the populations using other markers) but also not have good controls and being difficult to analyze. The role of dopamine in neuroimmunity is developing rapidly, and I think that many labs would be thrilled to be able to use flow to examine the DR on immune cells such as macrophages, T-cells, neutrophils, B-cells and others, so having high quality FACS antibodies would really help to advance this area of research.

we would also be very happy to have FACS antibodies for the DRs and would jump at the chance to test them out on human samples if they existed!