/sci/ - Science & Math

alpha-gal allergy is due to a tick that previously bit a deer or rodent vomiting it's last meal into you if you pick it off wrong. your immune system releases a response against a unique carbohydrate that’s not present on primate cell walls. Your body becomes violently sick whenever you eat red meat from that point on. You can feed the patient fish, veggies, basedlet green, alligator, chicken, flesh from GGTA1 knockout animals, and ze bugs without issue, but feed them any mammalian red meat and they get sick. It’s an inducible allergy from a shitty little tick, and it’s because your body has specific antibodies against that carbohydrate.

Western blots, this is a fairly simple way to demonstrate how a monoclonal antibody will attack only one specific protein. Take a sample of proteins, separate them out using native PAGE, and expose this new gel of separated protein to the antibody that targets the specific protein you’re looking for. Stain the gel with a radioactive or fluorescent marker that targets the antibody and you’ll see one singular line (or spot if you use 2-DE) or a couple if there are multiple proteins being targeted by different specific antibodies. This is the gold standard of finding if the immune system (for now, COVID research is now using cryo-EM to find the protein structure and simulate antibody binding) is targeting one of your proteins of interest today. For malaria, the proteins you’d run PAGE on would be plasmodium, as you could then use this data to find what specific proteins to make vaccines for.

both of these are clear-cut cases of how antibodies themselves are specific, and the immune response to them are also spesific.