ProSci Antibodies Power Breakthrough Brain Mapping Technology

 When the world’s leading neuroscience teams set out to map the brain with nanoscale precision, they faced a simple but critical obstacle: no existing antibodies could do the job.

So they turned to ProSci.

In a groundbreaking preprint on bioRxiv—“Combinatorial protein barcodes enable self-correcting neuron tracing with nanoscale molecular context”—researchers from the Church and Boyden labs unveiled PRISM, a new platform that combines protein barcodes, tissue expansion, and iterative immunostaining to reconstruct neurons with extraordinary accuracy.

To make it possible, they needed custom antibodies that didn’t yet exist.

ProSci created them.

Enabling Discovery When No Antibody Exists

The PRISM method uses engineered “barcode” proteins to label individual neurons, allowing computers to trace entire networks with molecular context. Each barcode must be detectable with an antibody that’s:

Highly specific to its target

Stable through multiple rounds of staining and stripping

Free from cross-reactivity with dozens of other epitopes

For the PRISM team, three key barcode proteins—MOON, SUN, and TAG-100—had no commercially available antibodies.

“Custom antibodies were produced by ProSci against MOON, SUN, and TAG-100, as there were no commercially available antibodies suitable for PRISM multiplexing.”
— Excerpt from the PRISM methods section

Using our custom polyclonal development workflow, ProSci synthesized peptides, conjugated them for immunization, validated them by ELISA, and affinity-purified each antibody for integration into the PRISM imaging pipeline. The result: three new, high-performance antibodies that helped researchers map the brain in ways never before possible.

What Makes PRISM Revolutionary

PRISM (Protein-barcode Reconstruction via Iterative Staining with Molecular annotations) breaks through the limits of traditional fluorescent labeling. Instead of being confined to a handful of colors, PRISM’s combinatorial protein barcodes expand labeling diversity by more than 750-fold.

https://www.prosci-inc.com/blog/prosci-antibodies-power-breakthrough-brain-mapping-technology/