Ten lines of transgenic mice secreting transmissible gastroenteritis coronavirus (TGEV) neutralizing recombinant monoclonal antibodies (rMAbs) into the milk were generated. The rMAb light- and heavy-chain genes were assembled by fusing the genes encoding the variable modules of the murine MAb 6A.C3, which binds an interspecies conserved coronavirus epitope essential for virus infectivity, and a...

Underlying the development of antibody diversity is a unique pattern of gene organization and molecular events. THREE FAMILIES OF IMMUNOGLOBULIN GENES exist in mammals, one encoding HEAVY chains, another KAPPA chains, and the third LAMBDA chains. Each of these clusters contains one or more constant region genes and a number of variable region gene segments. The formation of a complete variable ...

Eleven monoclonal antibodies specific for a spin-labeled dinitrophenyl hapten (DNP-SL) have been produced for use in NMR studies. They have been named AN01 and AN03-AN12. The stability constants for the association of these antibodies with DNP-SL and related haptens were measured by fluorescence quenching and ranged from 5.0 X 10(4) M-1 to greater than 1.0 X 10(8) M-1. cDNA clones coding for th...

A monoclonal antibody, 2B6, has been prepared against the embryonic myosin heavy chain of rat skeletal muscle. On solid phase radioimmunoassay, 2B6 shows specificity to myosin isozymes known to contain the embryonic myosin heavy chain and on immunoblots of denatured contractile proteins and on competitive radioimmunoassay, it reacts only with the myosin heavy chain of embryonic myosin and not w...

Antibodies' protective, pathological, and therapeutic properties result from their considerable diversity. This diversity is almost limitless in potential, but actual diversity is still poorly understood. Here we use deep sequencing to characterize the diversity of the heavy-chain CDR3 region, the most important contributor to antibody binding specificity, and the constituent V, D, and J segmen...

The primary antibody response of C57BL/6 mice to the 4-hydroxy-3-nitrophenylacetyl (NP) hapten is restricted to antibody molecules expressing the NPb idiotype. This idiotype is a genetic marker for V genes in the heavy chain linkage group. In the secondary response, the frequency of NPb idiotype-positive molecules within the antibody population drops to very low values. Accordingly, isolated NP...

A unique type of combinatorial protein libraries has been constructed. These libraries are based on the pre-B cell receptor (pre-BCR). The pre-BCR is a protein that is produced during normal development of the antibody repertoire. Unlike that of canonical antibodies, the pre-BCR subunit is a trimer that is composed of an antibody heavy chain paired with two surrogate light chain (SLC) component...

Efficient generation of catalytic antibodies is uniquely dependent on the exact nature of the binding interactions in the antigen-antibody complex. Current methods for generation of monoclonal antibodies do not efficiently survey the immunological repertoire and, therefore, they limit the number of catalysts that can be obtained. We are exploring methods to clone and express the immunological r...

Psychotic episodes in lupus patients can be triggered by an antibody attack on brain cells, according to Matus et al. (page 3221). The psychosis that occurs in a small subset of lupus patients is associated with an antibody that recognizes a trio of ribosomal phosphoproteins. It was assumed that this antibody binds to the cell surface version of one of the phosphoproteins and somehow penetrates...

The variable-region genes of monoclonal antibody against Bacillus cereus spores were cloned from mouse hybridoma cells by reverse transcription-PCR. The heavy- and light-chain variable-region genes were connected by a 45-base linker DNA to allow folding of the fusion protein into a functional tertiary structure. For detection of protein expression, a 10-amino-acid strep tag (biotin-like peptide...