Charles Cangro

In 1985, Charles Cangro, a doctoral student at Georgetown, developed a method for the production of highly specific rabbit anti-NAAG antibodies and a parallel method that used a water-soluble carbodiimide for covalently coupling NAAG within cells during tissue fixation (Cangro et al., 1987).These antibodies and the fixation method were used to establish that the peptide was concentrated in nerve cells throughout the brain (Anderson et al., 1986).Over the next decade, these antibodies were used to define the neuronal distribution of NAAG in the rat (Cangro et al., 1987 ; Moffett et al., 1994 ; Moffett and Namboodiri, 1995 ; Renno et al., 1997), amphibian (Kowalski et al., 1987), cat (Tieman et al., 1987), primate (Tieman et al., 1991), and human (Tieman et al., 1988) nervous systems.In parallel, other preparations of polyclonal and monclonal antibodies against NAAG (Blakely et al., 1987 ; Forloni et al., 1987 ; Frondoza et al., 1990 ; Tsai et al., 1993) have been used by the Coyle laboratory to study the cellular distribution of NAAG in the rat brain and in studies of human brain pathology (Passani et al., 1997a).

These immunohistochemical studies demonstrated the extraordinarily broad distribution of the peptide throughout the mammalian brain, spinal cord, and sensory neurons.The peptide is present in a number of important projection pathways, such as ascending and descending spinal axons, spinal motoneurons, retinal ganglion cells, geniculo-cortical neurons, the nigrostriatal pathway, some cerebellar afferent neurons, neurons of the deep cerebellar nuclei, and large spinal sensory neurons (Cangro et al., 1987 ; Forloni et al., 1987 ; Tieman et al., 1988, 1991 ; Tsai et al., 1993 ; Moffett et al., 1994 ; Moffett and Namboodiri, 1995 ; Renno et al., 1997).