Question

5. If you are given a monoclonal antibody and a polyclonal antibody against a given protein, which do you think is more likely to have blocking activity (to inhibit the function of the given protein)? 6. The Zebra fish is a model organism used to study vertebrate development. One feature of Zebra fish that is that particularly useful is that they are transparent during the early stages of development and therefore you can visualize whole live fish (and all their cells) in a microscope. However, it is often difficult to clearly distinguish cell types apart and to follow the length of long cells such as neurons. You are interested in how the nervous system develops and wish to view all the neurons in a zebra fish as it develops. Describe a way that you could readily identify and visualize all the neurons in a living zebra fish. Assume a gene has already been identified that is transcribed in all neurons and is not transcribed in any other cell types.

Please help with the 2 questions.

For 6, I think we can use GFP, but I'm not sure if it's right and I don't know how to describe the process.

Answer 1

5. Monoclonal antibodies are those which have only one binding site contrary to polyclonal which has more than one binding sites. hence for blocking a specific protein monoclonal antibodies would serve the purpose best because these would bind to only that protein. polyclonal antibodies due to many available sites on it can react to other components as well.

6. The development process can be traced via microscopy hence we need to visualize cell. As given in the question there is one protein which is specific to nervous system cells only and its product is also available or synthesized in these cells. hence it is clear that we have to target that protein only.

So develop antibodies against this target. Now antibody alone won't be visible hence we can tag with antibodies with any reporter molecule. As you suggested GFP is one of those reporter molecules. Hence GFP tagged antibodies would bind to that protein. We can track the movement of GFP via fluorescence microscopy.