[Music] hi and welcome back to three science lessons cote UK by the end of this video you should be able to describe what's meant by a monoclonal antibody you should then be able to describe how monoclonal antibodies are produced now we've already looked at the immune system we saw that white blood cells can produce antibodies antibodies are protein molecules which stick to pathogens like this now there are some key ideas about antibodies that you need to understand firstly antibodies are produced by white blood cells called lymphocytes secondly lymphocytes produce antibodies against anything that the body detectors foreign scientists called foreign objects like this antigens now scientists can trigger lymphocytes to produce antibodies and that can be really useful for example antibodies are used in pregnancy testing kits and in certain cancer treatments I'm showing you here a lab mouse if we inject a mouse like this with an antigen then lymphocytes will produce antibodies against the antigen we can then collect the lymphocytes from the mouse now the problem is that lymphocytes like this will not divide by mitosis so in the next stage we fuse or join a lymphocyte with a tumor cell tumor cells are very good at dividing by mitosis the cell we produce is called hybridoma hybridoma cells can produce antibodies and divide by mitosis in the next stage we select a single hybridoma cell producing the antibody that we want we now allow this hybridoma cell to divide by mitosis to form a clone of identical hybridoma cells so the antibodies produced from this clone of hybridoma cells are all identical we call these monoclonal antibodies because they all come from a single hybridoma clone a large amount of our monoclonal antibody can then be collected and purified so let's look at some of the key facts about one a clonal antibodies as we've seen monoclonal antibodies are produced from a single clone of hybridoma cells that means that monoclonal antibodies are specific to one binding site on one protein antigen the benefit of this is that monoclonal antibodies can target a specific chemical or specific cells in the body and that means that monoclonal antibodies have got a large number of uses and we look at those in the next video we wanna find plenty of questions on monoclonal antibodies in my vision workbook and you can get that by clicking on the link above ok so hopefully now you should be able to describe what's meant by a monoclonal antibody you should then be able to describe how monoclonal antibodies are produced [Music]