I am trying to understand the potential use cases here.
Say you now can get the protein sequences of all the antibodies you used in your experiments/essays/kits, will this extra piece of information help your research in any ways? What would be some applications this may enable?
All inputs and comments are appreciated!
One thing it would do is it would make it easier to produce the antibody on your own. That would probably do more to depress prices overall than to make money for the copy-cat. So it might not be a huge market, but I could see people doing it.
Aside from making money, I see a charitable case for depressing biotech prices overall. The lower we can get the barriers of entry to biotech to be, the better for the world at large.
In part, the open source movement is about empowering people with knowledge, so they can come up with uses that you or I can't even think of in advance.
The antibody sequence information is essential for monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) engineering, function optimization, database banking, and patent application. In fact, this is widely used in bio-pharmaceutical industry. Many commercialized antibody sequencing service are available from the biopharma contract research organization/company. Here are some links FYI.
http://www.creative-biolabs.com/next-generation-antibody-sequencing.html
http://www.genscript.com/mAb-sequencing.html
http://www.mclab.com/Antibody-Sequencing-Services.html
But for experimental use, there is no necessary to know all sequence information of all the antibody you used, as i think.
It ensures that you know which antibodies you used. There have been cases where researcher thought they verified their results with different antibodies - and it turned out that the bought the same, substandard antibody under different names from different vendors. It also facilitates tracking which antibodies actually work well for a given task, and which ones have caused problems.
For reproduction of the antibody the CDR sequences would be highly convenient. This is now becoming an essential piece of data for kit manufacturers. However, when a kit is dependent on polyclonal antibodies because there is no monoclonal available that is fit for purpose, it is no longer the sequence of the antibody that is important, but the sequence of the immunogen. In fact, when the epitope of the monoclonal is known, the CDR sequence is not that important either. Most polyclonal antibodies are not fit for reproduction since they are generated by an entire protein or a large chunk of it. This means that each animal will generate different polyclonal antibodies to this protein, and so validation has to be done all over again from each individual animal. Either use a poly against a short peptide (limited animal to animal variation), or go for a monoclonal with known epitope so at least you know what the antibody binds to (no cross-reaction to related other proteins).
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