Antibodies can be extremely useful tools for the field of triplet repeat diseases. These reagents are important for localizing proteins in tissues, and within cells, they can be used in the isolation and characterization of the components of protein complexes, they can distinguish proteins with normal or an expanded polyglutamine repeat, they may be able to distinguish distinct conformations of a protein, and they can be used to perturb the function of proteins in living cells. Our group has produced monoclonal and recombinant single-chain antibodies that can be used for each of these purposes with huntingtin. This is the protein that, when mutated to contain an expanded polyQ motif, causes Huntington’s disease.
