Immunological techniques in the study of biochemical problems

Abstract

For many years now serological differentiation of bacterial strains and determination of blood groups have been standard methods in hospital laboratories. More recently a great deal of research effort has been directed towards investigating the many protein components of serum and their relation to disease. This work has been very dependent on immunological techniques. Because of their high specificity and sensitivity, such methods have become useful tools to biochemists and protein chemists. In this laboratory immunological methods have been used to investigate problems of comparative biochemistry, to obtain estimates of the size of proteins, and to gauge the effect on protein structure produced by procedures which chemically alter the amino acids of the protein. The work in this laboratory is concerned with the study of copper-containing proteins from the blood of invertebrates (haemocyanins), and from humans (caeruloplasmin). Some of this work is described in this article. The principles behind the techniques are described in some detail in the hope of stimulating their use in other fields of research.