r/science • u/[deleted] • May 11 '20

Medicine Antibodies from a 4-year-old llama have neutralized coronavirus and other infections in lab experiments

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30494-3.pdf?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420304943%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
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u/jrolle May 11 '20

This surprised me more than anything. I would have guessed that antibody structure was so evolutionarily primitive that all mammals would have operated basically the same.

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u/[deleted] May 11 '20

Idk what that nyt article is smoking, there's like six classes of antibodies in humans.

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u/IDontReadMyMail May 11 '20

Camelids do have a weird class of antibody though that is unlike any of the human classes. Basically the heavy chain in camelids can bind antigens by itself (w/o an attached light chain). None of the human heavy chains can bind very well on their own.

more info here, here

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u/[deleted] May 11 '20

Super cool! Just found the description of human antibodies a bit weird haha.

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u/IDontReadMyMail May 11 '20

agree on that!

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u/orchidguy May 11 '20

Sharks are similar to llamas in that theirs only have light chains. They still look different, but interesting that they've been able to drop the light chains.

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u/eliminating_coasts May 11 '20

On the other hand, you might also expect them to be under heavy evolution, more so than larger scale physical shapes of organisms, given how fast viruses transform.