Hi,
This may be a silly question, but what is monoclonal in monoclonal antibody? I am new to the field of antibody. Let say, if we generate mAb with mouse, does monoclonal mean that it is produced from one mouse? Does monoclonal antibody be recombinant?
Thanks
Monoclonal means it comes from clones of a single immune cell. The classic way to do this is to fuse the cell that produce the antibody ( effector B cells for example) to a cancerous cell ( myeloma ). These new cells can be selected and multiply until you have enough cell to produce a descend quantity of antibodies. All the daughter cells will produce the same antibody against the same epitope.
Polyclonal on the other hand means "many" clone, antibodies from multiple B cells each targeting a different epitope. They are produced by injecting an animal with the antigen and some adjuvants, and later purified from the serum of that animal.
Monoclonal antibodies can be recombinant but it is much more complicated technique involving PCR techniques and host cells. As far as I know, recombinant will always be monoclonal but not all monoclonal are recombinant. It is unclear but you may also mean antibodies from recombinant protein. That is something else, some protein don't behave well when injected in the body ( transmembrane protein for example) so recombinant protein are made by removing certain part of the protein that cause trouble. That makes it easier to produce antibodies in an animal.
There is some advantage to monoclonal antibody. Since they are produced by cancerous cell, they can be maintained for a very long time and will always be the same ( well almost). They have less cross-reactivity.
There is some disadvantages. They will stop reacting if little change happen to the epitope. They are harder to produce at first and take a long time to have a usable quantity ( selecting the right b-cell, getting good hybridomas etc).
An antibody which can be act against a particular antigen or disease is known as monoclonal antibody.
Monoclonal antibody is one which produced a large quantity using mice against a specific antigen.
When preparing cells secreting an antibody against a given antigen you make the fusion between spleen cells from mice inoculated with your antigen and myeloma cells. You then grow the fused cells in HAT medium, allowing only fused hybrids to grow, make dilutions with the growing colonies to give (theoretically) one cell per well ; test the growing colonies (clones = derived from a single cell) to determine those secreting antibodies against the antigen under investigation and then select cell colonies, each secreting a monoclonal antibody.
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