A METHOD OF ANALYSING RELATIVE EPITOPE APPEARANCE IN A PLURALITY OF SAMPLES

摘要

The invention provides a method and materials for monitoring and isolating differentially expressed epitopes. In accordance with the method of the invention, differently labelled populations of epitopes from sources to be compared are competitively bound with a display library to provide a differential expression library which, in the preferred embodiment, may be manipulated by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). Monitoring the relative signal intensity of the different fluorescent labels on the reference display library permits quantitative analysis of expression levels relative to the reference sample. The invention also provides a method for identifying and isolating rare epitopes etc. Populations of display library having relative signal intensities of interest can be isolated by FACS and the attached epitopes etc. can be identified by two dimensional electrophoresis and, or MS-MS sequencing. Selected organisms can be isolated by FACS and cultivated or used as starting material for differential protein screening.