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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

antibody production, diversification, humanized mice, immune response

College

Life Sciences

Department

Microbiology and Molecular Biology

Abstract

Many scientists are skeptical of using humanized mice to study the human adaptive immune response. The reasoning behind this skepticism stems from discrepancies in various studies seen previously. A study conducted by Traggiai et al. showed that humanized mice elicited a human adaptive immune response when challenged with the tetanus toxin (Traggiai). In addition, good antibody responses have been shown in humanized mice when challenged with Dengue virus (Kuruvilla). However, others have found only rare antibody responses to HIV when humanized mice were challenged (Baenziger). As mentioned earlier, a study conducted by Becker et al. showed the production of human monoclonal IgM antibodies, but they were not able to detect any class switching to human IgG (Becker). Seeing the variability in previous studies, the hope of my project was to better the consistency within the immune response of humanized mice. I planned to achieve this by monitoring concentrations of human antibodies in humanized mice over various time points. I also worked with another undergraduate in determining the process of B cell development and maturation so that we could better predict which humanized mice will respond to an antigen and produce the best antibody response. Through improving the humanized mouse model, our goal was to help researchers obtain more reliable and reproducible results when conducting research with humanized mice.

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