Fig. 2

Pictorial representation of nesprin-1-giant and nesprin-1-α2 proteins with locations of monoclonal antibody (mAb) epitopes. Nesprin-1-α2 has a unique N-terminal sequence, but is otherwise identical to the C-terminal region of Nesprin-1-giant, including the unstructured and highly conserved “Star” region [28] and the alternatively spliced and highly conserved “DV23” exon [1, 4, 22, 28]. The N-terminal start point of nesprin-1-beta-1 relative to nesprin-1-giant, is shown as a black arrow. Red arrows indicate positions of the epitopes of mAbs against nesprin-1 that have been used in this study. Monoclonal antibodies MANNES1A and MANNES1E recognise the common C-terminal region of nesprin-1-giant and nesprin-1-α2 [26]. The new mAb, N1alpha2-1H2 recognises the unique N-terminal region of nesprin-1-α2 and the other new mAbs recognise nesprin-1-giant but not nesprin-1-α2