Short Communication on: Study of Avidity of Antigen-Specific Antibody as a Means of Understanding Development of Long-Term Immunological Memory after Vibrio cholerae O1 Infection

Interaction between antigen and antibody modulates key biological processes in neutralizing and eliminating pathogenic microorganisms following infection. The strength of this interaction depends on the affinity, valency and three dimensional arrangements of the interacting epitopes and paratopes. The measure of the overall strength of this multimeric interaction is termed as ‘Avidity’. Development of antibody with high avidity is a crucial feature of a secondary immune response followed by a low avidity antibody producing primary response [1,2]. Thus antibody avidity has been used as a marker for B cell maturation and is an important surrogate for determining long term immunological memory responses to pathogens. In our article entitled “Study of avidity of antigen-specific antibody as a means of understanding development of long-term immunological memory after Vibrio cholerae O1 infection” we showed that antibody avidity after infection and immunization is a good correlate of the development and maintenance of memory B cell responses to V. cholerae O1 antigens. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that assesses antibody avidity following a non-invasive mucosal infection [3].