I know there are bioinformatic tools that allow epitope prediction to determine if a certain peptide would trigger an immune response. I also read that for allergen diagnoses IgE of sensitised patients is sometimes used to do an immunoblot to check for IgE epitopes on putative allergens. These IgE epitopes are sometimes published.
My question is: Can the peptides that can bind to IgE be used to trigger an immune response in mice and raise polyclonal Igg antibody?
Hi Joost,
Can the peptides that can bind to IgE .. Igg antibody? Yes. One epitope can generate antibodies of different Isotypes/subclasses, although some epitopes are favourable to certain subclasses). Actually, polyclonals would normally contain range of subclasses/isotypes and your secondary/label/screening is what determine what class is screened.
Regarding the MHC question: not sure what you mean here? MHC is mainly concerned with epitope recognition by T cells (maybe you could elaborate?).
Hi Abdo Alnabulsi , thanks a lot for your answer! Good to know the epitopes will work for various Ig classes.
Regarding the MHC recognition, what i understood from immunology is that MHCs bind and present epitopes to T cells which eventually leads to triggering B cells to produce antibodies right? So i was just wondering if you have an epitope X that binds to MHC and that is known to cause an allergic reaction Y (IgE reaction) in allergic humans, can that same epitope X be used to sensitize mice and create polyclonals that can then be used to try and detect that epitope through ELISA in a food matrix or is this epitope X perhaps not going to be recognized by Mice MHC s and not lead to antibody production?
Would be great to get ypou opinion on this!
Hi Joost Nelis ,
Epitope recognition and ultimately their prediction is different between MHC_T cells and B cells. For example, the length is different; MHC II known to recognise epitopes with 9-22 AA residues (~9 core), whereas B cells can recognise epitopes can vary from 5-20 AA. Therefore, the immunogenicity characteristics differ. Nonetheless, if your epitope X satisfies the characteristics known to induce B-cells response, there is no reason why it cannot be used to generate polyclonal. This is in theory at least, because the main issue of antibodies is their specificity especially, for example, if your epitope x is highly similar to other epitopes in other targets.
So, you would need to analyse epitope x using different B-cells epitope prediction models. Also, BLASTing it would give you an indication of the potential difficulty of characterising the specificity of generated antibodies.
Hope that helps.
BW
Abdo
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