what are they, the process and advantages and disadvantages?
thank you!
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To say it differently, if you injected a very tiny bunny into your blood stream, your immune system would deal with it by generating thousands of antibodies to the different features of the bunny – some recognize the cottony tail, some the feet, the whiskers, the ears, or the big teeth. These are the polyclonal antibodies – they know all the different parts of the bunny, and they are a mixture of multiple, unique antibodies (hence the term ‘poly’) with a single, but complex target: a rabbit. The problem with polyclonal sets of antibodies is that they are hard to reproduce batch-to-batch. You are dependent on the animal host to recreate the set, in the same proportions, and with the same recognition sites. You can’t guarantee that in different hosts.
But really, the defining feature of a bunny is the long ears, right? That’s what makes a bun. So if you can identify and purify the *one* (mono) antibody that just recognizes the bunny ears, then you have condensed the entire set down to just the best and most accurate one. Much easier to produce and should work more consistently against its target than the set.
Both have their benefits and detriments, but generally, receiving a monoclonal antibody for a medical treatment (or using it in an experiment) means we have solid expectations for how well this will work, and how to control it. Being given a polyclonal ab translates to “we expect this to work, but we won’t be able to say why, or how, or be able to control it as well” because you don’t know which antibodies in the set are necessary or successful.
Polyclonals can be kind of a black box (not always, I’m speaking generally).
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