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Tool for valid analysis of antibody responses in mice

Finally there is a resource to enable proper sequence analysis of antibody responses in the commonly used Balb/c mouse strain.

– Published 15 September 2022

This strain mostly uses antibody-coding genes completely different from those of other commonly used inbred strains like C57BL/6. The genes of Balb/c have up until now been poorly represented in reference databases. Researchers at the Department of Immunotechnology and teams in Australia, USA, UK, Germany, Sweden, and Israel collaborated to establish the set of germline gene sequences that will now allow valid analysis of antibody responses in these mice. This resource is now featured in the Open Germline Receptor Database and it can be directly queried in the IgBlast tool provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH. Interested? If so, please have a look at this paper by Katherine Jackson et al. that describes this resource in detail. By the way, if you are interested in expressed antibody gene sequences of another mouse strains, there is a good chance that you'll find the relevant germline set in the Open Germline Receptor Database, as well.