Antibody advantages over polyclonal antibodies

In addition to their improved specificity, monoclonal antibodies offer other significant advantages over polyclonal antiserums there is an indefinite supply of antibodies with constant characteristics together with relative ease in purification. 

Advantages of polyclonal antibodies over monoclonal antibodies are as follows (a) They are highly reactive due to the binding of multiple epitopes on the same antigen and (b) they are easy to produce. The disadvantage of polyclonal antibodies as compared to monoclonal antibodies is that they often have a lower degree of specificity (i.e., will bind antigens that are not of interest). 

Much discussion has taken place in the past few years about the desirability of monoclonal over polyclonal antibodies. Wfe believe each type of antibody has its unique uses, and discussion about the relative merits of each should be referred to a specific context. We have developed monoclonal antibodies initially because uniformity over time was thought to be an advantage in a regulatory program. 

While monoclonal antibodies are initially almost prohibitively expensive to produce, they offer very distinct advantages over polyclonal antisera for analytical applications. Of primary importance is the immortality of the hybridoma lines monoclonal Abs produced by this cell line will show relatively little batch-to-batch variation, and the repetitive use of animals for antibody production becomes unnecessary. In addition, the single-epitope selectivity of the monoclonal Ab tends to minimize cross-reactions, except with epitopes possessing very similar structural characteristics to the original antigen s epitope. 

In conclusion, our results demonstrate an effective application of polyclonal antibodies directed toward alachlor. These antibodies were used to develop an ELISA with a detection range from 0.2 to 8.0 ppb for alachlor in water. The demonstrated ability of the antibodies to distinguish alachlor from other chloroacetanilide herbicides allowed the successful application of this assay to the analysis of environmental water samples. Based on the analysis of a limited number of environmental water samples, the ELISA method was shown to be less accurate and precise than GC/MS. On the other hand, ELISA offers considerable advantages over GC/MS in terms of cost, speed, sample throughput, and portability. Our results suggest that the most effective use of this ELISA would be as a primary screen, in which samples falling below a threshold level of alachlor can be rapidly and cost-effectively eliminated from further instrumental analysis. 

From a pharmaceutical perspective, the most important advantage of MABs over their polyclonal equivalents is the potential to generate large quantities of antibody under precisely controlled conditions. 

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