Generation of Pan-reactive Antibody and Cytokine Reagents for Immunologic Analysis of Bats

ABSTRACT Understanding the immune response in bats can aid in the response to viral outbreaks and other diseases, but the bat research community suffers from a scarcity of immunologic research reagents. The remarkably high divergence among bat species makes the development of cross-reactive MAbs and cytokine reagents especially difficult. However, key residues within each protein form conserved epitopes that define the fundamental structure and function of that protein, so isolating MAbs that recognize these conserved epitopes provides an opportunity to generate MAbs that are reactive against most or all bat species (“pan-reactive”). Our goal in this project is to develop MAbs against the most important immune targets that are cross-reactive against nearly every bat species and characterized for every major research application, and an array of cytokines that can be used across bat species.