Question

How is it that antibodies can only detect one antigen and how is this useful in research?

Answer 1

Answer-

According to the given question-

• Antibodies or immunoglobulins (Ig) are made up of glycoproteins which are produced mainly by B lymphocytes and also found in surface of the cell.
• Antibodies have the capability to recognize and specifically bind with antigens or pathogen’s proteins and causes their neutralization as well as their destruction.
• antibodies is made up of four polypeptide chains in which two light chains called L chains and two heavy chains called H chains and both are joined with the help of disulfide bonds and resembles as "Y" shape structure.
• two regions one is variable and other is constant region are present in each polypeptide chain and called variable light or VL, variable heavy or VH, constant light CL, and constant heavy CH chain.
• Difference in each Antibodies is due to the amino acid sequence present in their variable regions responsible for antigen specificity and the antigen binding sites are formed from light (VL) and heavy (VH) chains variable regions.

Antibody Specificity-

• Each antibody have the ability to bind specifically bind with unique epitope of antigen due to presence of their unique Antigen Binding Site at the top of variable region.
• Due to this ability they bind very precisely by detecting the antigen which may be a protein from the other .Antibody have the ability to potentially recognize the homologous proteins present on the same epitope of an antigen.
• One antibodies also have the capability to bind and cross-react with another protein of antigen having same epitope.
• Due to these binding specificity and several property the antibodies is used for Monoclonal Antibodies production.

antibodies can be used in several scientific research to study the presence or location,their abundance, as well as function of different proteins present in the dynamic biological systems and also in Cancer and Rheumatoid arthritis releated disorder.