ABSTRACT
Polyclonal antibodies have been used from diverse species such as rabbit, goat, sheep, donkey, chicken, pigs, cats, dogs, minks, and cattle for almost a century as specic and high-afnity probes for a variety of immunological assays in research and clinical laboratories. While polyclonal-pooled immunoglobulin (Ig) is still the gold standard for the treatment of some human diseases, the high purity and specicity of monoclonal antibody will eventually oust these serum preparations from this position; monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) promise to be safer and more specic in therapy. While there are a few examples where MAbs have been developed for all of the above species [1,2], MAb development in these species has been very slow mostly because of a lack of reliable myeloma fusion partners resulting in unstable clones and complex back fusions to produce heterohybridomas [1]. Repertoire cloning by phage display has offered a new method for obtaining MAbs from immunized repertoires from all of these species, and for the immune systems of all jawed vertebrates in the future.
