Polyclonal antisera elicited bý lysozymes: insights into antigenic structure and evolution

Polyclonal antisera elicited by evolutionary variants of bird lysozymes c played a major role in the development of the multideterminant-regulatory model to describe the antigenic structure of globular proteins and in the demonstration that there is a strong correlation between immunological differences and amino acid sequence differences. This chapter reviews the evidence and calculations used to show, for lysozyme c and several other proteins, the essentially the entire surface of globular proteins is antigenic, that nearly all evolutionary substitutions affect immunological cross-reactivity, and that there is empirical and theoretical support for the use of immunological distances to infer genealogical relationships and establish approximate evolutionary time scales. In addition this chapter discusses several examples of the use of polyclonal antisera to lysozymes c and g to gain insights into molecular and organismal evolution and the regulation of gene expression.