Producing Antibodies of Predetermined Specificity from Escherichia coli Hybrid Proteins

A major use of bacterial expression vectors is the expression of fragments of DNA against which monoclonal or polyclonal antibodies may be raised. In some cases this is the only way of generating an antibody, e.g., when investigating an open reading frame of DNA for which the gene product is unknown. By raising an antibody against the in-vitro-expressed DNA fragment, its expression in vivo can be investigated. In other cases, polyclonal or monoclonal antibodies may already be available, but the strategy of raising antibodies against hybrid Escherichia coli proteins is chosen because of the advantages that this brings.