Dear Sam Wang:
Since my focus is in the area of humoral rather than in cellular
immunology, please allow me to address your question from a slightly
different perspective.
Monoclonal antibodies interact within very limited regions of space. The
epitopes that monoclonal antibodies react with are very much
site-restricted and specific.
The polyclonal humoral response to a whole, intact antigen, for
instance to an entire protein that contains many individual epitopes, may
be called the general humoral response to the entire antigen. This
overall response is composed of polyclonal antibodies.
If one focuses only on the individual monoclonal antibody interactions at
their various site-specific locations, one may lose a sense of the overall
humoral polyclonal reaction.
Yet, the overall polyclonal humoral response itself may be ameniable to
scientific analysis and categorization. The further clarification of
this phenomenom and, furthermore, its possible relationship to the
individual reactions of an antigen's monoclonal antibodies at their
respective site-specific epitope locations is presently the goal of my
scientific endeavors.
Analagously, the cellular immune resposne may be thought of in terms of
individual T-cell responses and the overall response comprised of all T-cell
clones reactive with the antigen.
As with the overall polyclonal humoral resposne, the overall polyclonal
T-cell response may retain the sense of the the antigen's four dimensional
space-time to which you alluded.
Yours truly,
Bill Kokolus, Ph. D.
c On
14 Jul 1999, wang wrote:
> All,
>> I'm teaching myself in Immunology. I met a question
> about the antigen.Immunologist know that antigen
> functions with its dimensional construction. But In the
> text I'm now reading I see the following cotent:
> Antigen was aborbed by APC and processed into small
> fragments which can combined with MHC molecule. That's
> the question: how do small molecules present its
> original dimensional information?
>> THANKS A LOT!
>>>> Best regards,
> Sam wang mailto:epiw at yeah.net>>>>
William Joseph Kokolus, Ph. D.
President, Rhythmic Rainbow Biologicals
69 Ferndale Ave.
Kenmore, N. Y. 14217-1003
phone and fax: (716) 873-6940
e-mail: cm006 at freenet.buffalo.edu
