Preparation of monospecific anti-PAG antibodies for cattle pregnancy detection: use of synthetic peptides to improve specificity

Abstract

Immunological methods involving pregnancy associ-ated glycoproteins (PAG) are used for cattle preg-nancy detection. The faults of these methods could be overcomed by using antibodies specific for each member of the PAG family. In order to differentiate between very similar proteins, preparation of anti-bodies specific for peptides is a method of choice. In this work, we summarize a series of considerations regarding peptide design and choose free access NCBI, Antigenicity Plot, EMBOSS Antigenic and Expasy tools to apply them. We design peptides spe-cific for different reported PAG members and obtain the corresponding polyclonal antibodies for five of them.