Evaluation and Validation of Commercially Available Dopamine Transporter Antibodies.

With a wide variety of dopamine transporter (DAT) antibodies available commercially, it is important to validate which antibodies provide sufficient immunodetection for reproducibility purpose and for accurate analysis of DAT levels and/or location. Commercially available DAT antibodies that are commonly used were tested in western blotting (WB) on wild-type (WT) and DAT-knock-out (DAT-KO) brain tissue and with immunohistology (IH) techniques against coronal slices of unilaterally lesioned 6-OHDA rats, in addition to wild-type and DAT-knock-out mice. DAT-KO mice and unilateral 6-OHDA lesions in rats were used as a negative control for DAT antibody specificity.