The first use of the term "antibody" occurred in a text by Paul Ehrlich.
The term ''Antikörper'' (the German word for ''antibody'') appears in the conclusion of his article "Experimental Studies on Immunity", published in October 1891, which states that "if two substances give rise to two different antikörper, then they themselves must be different".
However, the term was not accepted immediately and several other terms for antibody were proposed; these included ''Immunkörper'', ''Amboceptor'', ''Zwischenkörper'', ''substance sensibilisatrice'', ''copula'', ''Desmon'', ''philocytase'', ''fixateur'', and ''Immunisin''.
The study of antibodies began in 1890 when Emil von Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburō described antibody activity against diphtheria and tetanus toxins. Behring and Kitasato put forward the theory of humoral immunity, proposing that a mediator in serum could react with a foreign antigen.
Their idea prompted Paul Ehrlich to propose the side chain theory for antibody and antigen interaction in 1897, when he hypothesized that receptors (described as “side chains”) on the surface of cells could bind specifically to toxins – in a "lock-and-key" interaction – and that this binding reaction was the trigger for the production of antibodies.
Other researchers believed that antibodies existed freely in the blood and, in 1904, Almroth Wright suggested that soluble antibodies coated bacteria to label them for phagocytosis and killing; a process that he named opsoninization.
In the 1920s, Michael Heidelberger and Oswald Avery observed that antigens could be precipitated by antibodies and went on to show that antibodies were made of protein.
The biochemical properties of antigen-antibody binding interactions were examined in more detail in the late 1930s by John Marrack.
The next major advance was in the 1940s, when Linus Pauling confirmed the lock-and-key theory proposed by Ehrlich by showing that the interactions between antibodies and antigens depended more on their shape than their chemical composition.
In 1948, Astrid Fagreaus discovered that B cells, in the form of plasma cells, were responsible for generating antibodies.
Further work concentrated on characterizing the structures of the antibody proteins. A major advance in these structural studies was the discovery in the early 1960s by Gerald Edelman and Joseph Gally of the antibody light chain, and their realization that this protein was the same as the Bence-Jones protein described in 1845 by Henry Bence Jones. Edelman went on to discover that antibodies are composed of disulfide bond-linked heavy and light chains. Around the same time, antibody-binding (Fab) and antibody tail (Fc) regions of IgG were characterized by Rodney Porter.
Together, these scientists deduced the structure and complete amino acid sequence of IgG, a feat for which they were jointly awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
While most of these early studies focused on IgM and IgG, other immunoglobulin isotypes were identified in the 1960s: Thomas Tomasi discovered secretory antibody (IgA) and David Rowe and John Fahey identified IgD, and IgE was identified by Kikishige Ishizaka and Teruki Ishizaka as a class of antibodies involved in allergic reactions.
Genetic studies identifying the basis of the vast diversity of these antibody proteins when somatic recombination of immunoglobulin genes was by Susumu Tonegawa in 1976.
Further Reading
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