Antigen microarrays: descriptive chemistry or functional immunomics?

József Prechl1, Krisztián Papp, Anna Erdei

  • 1Research Group of Immunology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest 1117, Hungary. jprechl@iif.hu

Trends in Immunology
|February 24, 2010
PubMed

Advances in protein microarray technology allow the generation of high content, reliable information about complex, multilevel protein interaction networks. Yet antigen arrays are used mostly only as devices for parallel immune assays describing multitudes of individual binding events. We propose here that the huge amount of immunological information hidden in the plasma of an individual could be better revealed by combining the characterization of antibody binding to target epitopes with improved estimation of effector functions triggered by these binding events. Furthermore, we could generate functional immune profiles characterizing general immune responsiveness of the individual by designing arrays incorporating epitope collections from diverse subsets of antibody targets.

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