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Editorials |
1 Department of Clinical Chemistry, University Hospital Ghent (2P8), De Pintelaan 185, B9000 Ghent, Belgium
aAuthor for correspondence. E-mail Joris.delanghe@ugent.be.
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In this issue, Levy and Levy (1) report on the development of an ELISA using single-chain antibodies (ScAbs) from a phage library for the determination of the major haptoglobin (Hp) phenotype in serum. This technical achievement is remarkable as the structural differences between the major Hp phenotypes 1-1, 2-1, and 2-2 are only minor (2). Apart from a single junction at the site of duplication of exon 3, there are no differences in primary amino acid sequence between the Hp alleles Hp1 and Hp2. The authors have taken advantage of the unique polymeric differences among Hp phenotypes to develop their ScAb-based ELISA.
ScAbs have been used for several years as a tool in the biomedical research laboratory. They have been applied in areas such as antibody and protein engineering, enzyme technology, vaccine development, and ligand-receptor studies with applications in oncology and immunology (3). The
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