Generation of Monoclonal Antibodies Against Chemokine Receptors

Chemokines are a family of structurally related, small chemoattractant proteins that interact with specific seven-transmembrane, G-protein-coupled receptors that mediate cell migration in chemotactic gradients (1 ,2 ). Chemokine-receptor expression is finely regulated during leukocyte differentiation, maturation, and activation, causing each cell subpopulation to express a specific set of chemokine receptors. Although they were initially considered as simple leukocyte chemoattractants, chemokines are now known to be implicated in diverse phases of the immune response, and their significance is becoming apparent in many areas of biomedicine, including cancer, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 infection, asthma, and cardiovascular disease (3 ). This has greatly increased interest in studying how chemokines exert their activities at the molecular level, which obviously requires specific reagents. Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that recognize chemokines or chemokine receptors are among the most useful tools for this purpose, particularly for cell expression and neutralization studies.