monoclonal antibodies

How many times have you met a couple and thought “ah, they’re a match made in heaven“?  A few times only most probably.  And if ever you did think that at one point, it isn’t unlikely that somewhere down the road something will happen to make you think otherwise.  It’s not that perfect couples don’t exist, but the way I see it, no one is perfect and our compatibility with another person is never readily available unless we make room for compromises.  Zooming in to the molecular level (before I digress completely into the topic of love), you may be surprised to note that perfect couples, or soulmates if you want, are actually commonplace.  A perfect example is the relationship of an antibody with an antigen.  Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that are part of the immune response of our body.  They are produced by B cells (a type of white blood cell) whenever an antigen enters our system.  On the other hand, an antigen is any foreign substance that is not recognized by our body as part of it.  It is our immune system’s responsibility to recognize and dispose of any foreign substance that it encounters.  Oops, seems like I made a mistake in my analogy, because it sounds more like a “match made in hell”.  But wait, let me explain why antibodies and antigens are “perfect couples”. 

sanger sequencing

When reading scientific articles, a lot of complex things that went on in the actual study are usually summarized in deceivingly simple verbs like “analyzed”, “measured”, “isolated”, and the like.  Unless we’re talking about isolating a baby in a crib, even isolating raisins from a chocolate bar is tedious.  Roughly, it would involve biting around the perimeter of the raisin, then melting in your mouth the chocolate from that fragment.  Of course in the laboratory, more hygienic, precise and efficient ways of isolation are employed.  Another classic example of these deceiving verbs would be “sequenced”.  Specifically, when DNA is sequenced.   You probably have heard of DNA sequencing in articles pertaining to the Human Genome Project: that massive international project of “sequencing” the entire human genome.  To be able to appreciate just how complex “sequencing” is, we need to understand what the human genome is.  

phage display

Phage display is a pretty cool way of expressing DNA.  It’s one of the techniques  that make high-throughput screening of protein interactions possible.  Another example of high-throughput screening is when your mother gives you a soliloquy of a lecture from the Sun to Pluto and all you heard was she’s going cut your allowance in half – the only thing that matters attention.  “Noooooo”  That analogy aside, the first thing to note is that the phage is a virus that exclusively infects bacteria.  The more formal term for a phage is actually a “bacteriophage”.  Phages are commonly employed as DNA vectors – carriers of DNA, be it fragments of human DNA or synthesized DNA in the laboratory – because they can easily be used to express recombinant DNA genes upon infection to typical host bacteria such as E. coli.

bioengineering

Attempting to define bioengineering as a distinct discipline is a task akin to scooping up the entire contents of a large bag of Cheetos with your two hands: impossible.  This is because bioengineering is in fact a discipline that rests on the foundations of other well-established disciplines such as chemistry, physics, biology and engineering.  In the most blunt of words, it’s an application of these different fields to any problem concerning the human body.  So how come humans get to hog the term “bio” in bioengineering.   Well, it’s basically because no one will fund multimillion (or even billion) dollar investments on a study about cows, ducks or mulberry trees.