Monoclonal, biclonal, Triclonal.... ??? - (Oct/26/2010 )

Someone in the lab (a very annoying someone) made a comment regarding oligoantibody-- in that you can have a monoclonal, biclonal, triclonal, and before you get to polyclonal you have an oligoclonal.

Has anyone ever heard of this before? If so, in what publication? And how many antibodies are involved in an oligoclonal?


~Super confused

I'm not sure what they are talking about, but here is a link to Wikipedia's oligoclonal band article. It looks to me like a bunch of Ig's strung together in response to a disease.

I guess the only oligoantibody I am familiar with is an oligo conjugated to an antibody for IPCR.

I have seen antibodies available that are termed "pooled monoclonal". This is what I imagine a bi- or triclonal antibody is as it's simply a mix of two or three monoclonal antibodies. Specifically, we have used a pooled Plk antibody that contains two monoclonals and is hence, a biclonal antibody. From what I can tell, a polyclonal antibody comes from many clones while the definition of the oligoclonal is a few clones. So we're talking semantics here. What precisely is the cut off for "few" and "many"?

At least one commercial test uses 2 mabs for capture each with a different specificity...test is for TnI