CROSS SPECIES APPLICABILITY OF ANTI-HUMAN PLASMA IGY AFFINITY COLUMN

In order to improve the sensitivity of proteomic analysis, our group has developed a chicken antibody based column that has successfully depleted high abundance proteins (HAPs) from human plasma prior to mass spectrometry analysis. The use of chicken as a host for polyclonal antibodies production conveys many advantages, including but not limited to, the capabilities of producing large quantities of IgY antibodies with minimal antigen quantities and enhanced immunogenicity exhibited by their immune systems against foreign immunogens. In this study, we explored the ability to use an anti-human IgY affinity column with a variety of plasma samples derived from different animals and demonstrate this column's ability to deplete the two most common HAPs (albumin and immunoglobulins) reproducibly in phylogenetically related species. Hence, our study highly recommends that IgY-based immune depletion technologies could be used to capture targeted proteins among phylogenetically related species without having to produce separate columns for each clade.