Luria and Delbruck identified that the frequency of mutation was subject to considerable fluctuation. They argued that the large fluctuation in the number of organism surviving exposure to bacteriophage meant that resistance was acquired through mutation rather than a physiolog ...

The classical method for determining the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) of an antibiotic is the tube test. Details of this test are well known and recognized methods are published (1). The recent development of the E-test (AB Biotest, S ...

Chapter 9 developed the concept of antibody clonality and described several methods that have been used to define antibody clonality in polyclonal sera. Affinity immunoblotting (1) has proven to be a powerful and high-resolution method for estimating clonality of immune responses to a v ...

Serum from normal individuals contains a repertoire of antibodies even in the absence of apparent immunization. The B-cell compartment of the immune system can recognize not only the antigens of the external environment, but also internal or self-antigens. Normal serum contains natur ...

The existence of opioid receptors as “narcotic analgesic binding components” in mammalian brain was first documented in the early 1970s (1–3). Shortly thereafter, endogenous opioid peptides (endorphins) that also bound to these receptors were found in mammalian brain tissue. Subse ...

In 1974, Niels Jerne (1) proposed a theory that pictured the immune system as a network of idiotypic-anti-idiotypic interactions regulating the immune response to an antigen. The theoretical basis for the construction of idiotypic structures mimicking external antigen results from ...

Despite major progress in various fields of chemical and molecular biology, generation of a synthetic molecule that possesses the catalytic qualities of enzymes has not been achieved. In order to overcome this obstacle, numerous attempts have been carried out to synthesize antibodies ...

Catalysis of various chemical transformations by antibodies opens broad perspectives in the fundamental and applied branches of life science (1). Antibodies are ideally suited for therapeutic applications owing to their capability of homing to a particular target. In addition, th ...

Monoclonal antibodies (MAb) with prespecified enzyme-like catalytic activity are obtained from the immune response against transition-state analogs (TSA). The premise for generating antibody catalysts, as put forth by Jencks (1), was validated through early examples of specif ...

The ability to make monoclonal rodent antibodies has revolutionized immunology. To reduce the immunogenicity of these antibodies for human in vivo use, methods have been developed to create artificial recombinant antibodies (1). Chimeric recombinant antibodies containing mo ...

The variable regions of antibody subunits are the “business ends” of these molecules responsible for interactions with antigens and activation of the biological functions of the constant regions. Rearrangement of variable-, diversity-, and joining-region genes and the hypermut ...

Antibodies to native B-DNA are common in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and their measurement serves as a diagnostic and prognostic marker of the disease (1). Autoreactive antibodies are also found in the sera of normal individuals (2). Natural autoantibodies crossreact with a vari ...

We have been collecting nucleotide and amino acid sequences of proteins of immunological interest, and aligning them in order to understand the structure and function relations of these proteins (1). To aid in organizing and analyzing this collection, a computer program, called SEQHUNT, w ...

In 1988 the first report on the expression of a fully functional recombinant Fab in E. coli (1) was one of the initiating events in the development of the field of antibody engineering. Shortly after came the report of the cloning and expression of antibody-variable domains as single-chain Fv or sFv (2). T ...

Introduction of mutations in antibody combining sites provides a powerful means to assess the functional role of individual residues and segments of the combining sites in interactions with antigen. Once cloned antibody fragments are available, several methods can be utilized to int ...

The display of antibody fragments on the surface of filamentous bacteriophages (1–7) constitutes a powerful system for the selection of molecules with desired specificities. In phage display, the antibody fragment is coupled to the minor coat protein (protein3) of bacteriophage M13 p ...

The application of phage display to the screening of antibody V-gene libraries promises to replace animal immunization and hybridoma technology as a means of antibody generation (1,2). Synthetic libraries offer the potential for expanding the immune system repertoire and designing ...

Asthma is associated with increased catalytic autoantibodies to vaso-active intestinal peptide (VIP), a bronchodilator and anti-inflammatory neuropeptide found in nerve endings supplying airway smooth muscle and epithelial structures (1). Asthmatic airways obtained at ...

Immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC), introduced in 1975 (1), relies on the formation of coordinate bonds between metal ions immobilized on a suitable support and electron donor groups in proteins. A polyhistidine tag (five or six His residues) placed at either the C- or N-termin ...

A subpopulation of antibodies with high affinity for the substrate ground state is also capable of chemical catalysis (1). However, high turnover by catalysts is dependent on efficient binding to the transition state, not the ground state. Direct screening for catalysis may permit isolat ...