A chimæra in Greek mythology is a fire-breathing creature with the body of a lion, the head of a goat and a snake as tail. In modern use, the word refers to something made up of different components, especially components from different species. For example, humanised monoclonal antibodies having the variable part from mice and a human Fc-part are used as pharmaceuticals (ending -ximab or -zumab) to avoid an immune reaction to the foreign Fc-part after repeated use.

DEar Tanaka

as Engelbert Buxbaum told, generally a chimeric protein is not a normal recombinant protein but is a mix of different protein.

For example is some cases when an antigen is highly variable and a single variant is not able to guarantee an high coverage, the scientists try to design chimeraes which are a mixture of the epitopes or domains of the most common variants.

eg https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25947148/

in some cases, scientist define as chimeraes, simple fusions between different variants but in this case the name chimera is used inappropriately.

ciao

Manuele

Interesting, Thanks for giving historical origin, got the idea.! Engelbert Buxbaum