Assessing In Vivo T Cell-Dependent Antigen-Specific Antibody Responses

Antibodies produced by plasma cells are a major arm of adaptive immunity. Germinal center reactions that include germinal center B cells and follicular T cells are fundamental players for antibody production, particularly antigen specific antibodies. Here we describe multiple methods that we and others have developed to analyze the production of antigen-specific antibodies in mice, with protocols for assessing antibody affinity and antibody isotype. The detection of antigen-specific IgE in serum using a traditional enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) method is often problematic due to much higher amounts of IgG. Thus we provide a specialized protocol for the detection of antigen-specific IgE in serum using ELISA.