Llama Blood Against Biological Terrorist Attacks

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Scientists have found that llama blood could quickly detect biological terrorist attacks and all sorts of maladies in the surrounding environment due to an unusual molecular structure of their antibodies. Llama blood could be made an inexpensive and diverse biosensor. Immune cells in the blood and lymph use antibodies to identify attacks or to directly bind to and neutralize germs. Currently, antibodies are used in medicines against cancers and other diseases or in sensors to warn of dangerous microbes and chemicals. Common mammalian antibodies are Y-shaped, made up of two different protein chains: one heavy and one light. The heavy chain is about two and a half times larger than the light one. Each short-end of the antibody bears the complementarity determining regions (or CDRs), where they bind antigens, or foreign substances. The use of antibodies in the emerging field of biosensors has stumbled with their instability at temperatures of about 60-70 degrees Celsius. "That's the Achilles' heel of these antibodies--when you start heating them up, those domains come apart and they catastrophically aggregate and they refold and they can't reassemble," says Andrew Hayhurst, a virologist and immunologist at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research. source news.softpedia.com