Funny Typo In Journal Article

[Travis]

I just had to post this somewhere:

Colchicine, which has been used clinically in the treatment of goats (Hastie, 1991), is a plant-derived alkaloid that binds to tubulin and depolymerizes microtubules...

Involvement of microtubule integrity in memory impairment caused by colchicine (Nakayama)

He means to say gout instead of "goats."

Just to make sure, I tracked down his reference to prove this was a typo. Maybe someone out there really does use it to treat goats?

Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries Colchicum was used only rarely due to its toxicity, but in the eighteenth century Colchieum use was revived for the treatment of acute gout (Fell and Ramsden, 1967). The active agent colchicine remains today a drug of choice in the therapy of this condition (Roberts et al., 1987).

INTERACTIONS OF COLCHICINE WITH TUBULIN (Hastie)

Nope. It was a typo. The author was Takahiro Nakayama from Osaka, Japan. I can just picture him telling his colleagues in Asian voice, "Owh yah. That goat-drug. Powerful goat drug."

(I posted this in the Hormone forum because 2-methoxyestradiol also inhibits microtubule synthesis.)

2-Methoxyestradiol, an endogenous mammalian metabolite, inhibits tubulin polymerization by interacting at the colchicine site

 

[ecstatichamster]

@Travis. Very funny.

 

[schultz]

I looked up goat + cholchicine in google and get pubmed hits.

There does seem to be some sort of antibody thing related to cholchicine that they get from goats.

Dose-dependent reversal of acute murine colchicine poisoning by goat colchicine-specific Fab fragments. - PubMed - NCBI

"High affinity antibodies (Ka = 2 x 10(10) M-1) against colchicine were raised in goats"

 

[Travis]

They have raised goat antibodies to nearly everything. In immunohistochemistry, first they usually use a rabbit antibody to tag a specific protein. They do this by injecting a rabbit with the target protein and then purify the antibodies the rabbit makes for one specific protein.

Then, they inject goats with that rabbit antibody to produce a goat antibody to the the rabbit antibody. This is the goat anti-rabbit antibody. They do this to improve sensitivity. It amplifies the signal since more than one secondary antibody can attach to the primary antibody.

The secondary antibody is usually labeled with a fluorescent molecule or avidin. In this way, you can actually see specific proteins under the microscope by attaching a series of specific antibodies to them.

I have no idea why goats and rabbits are used for this instead of, say...cats and mice.

I just did a search for "goat anti-rabbit igg" so I can find an image of this:

Here is a supplier: Goat Anti-Rabbit Alexa Fluor® 555 (IgG H&L) preadsorbed (ab150082)

And I found an article called Localization of 5-HT2A Receptor in rat cerebral cortex and olfactory system revealed by immunohistochemistry using two antibodies raised in rabbit and chicken

After washing with PBS, the cells were incubated with FITC-labeled goat anti-chicken IgG KPL, 1:100 and Texas-red-labeled goat anti-rabbit IgG Vector, 1:200 for 1 h.