Egg Yolk Antibodies

When chicken egg yolk antibodies are first made, they are about half as active as they are if the procedure of making and purifying the antibodies to make them starts with the free-living phase when the antibodies were not newly made. (This is because the chicken egg yolk antibody is made so quickly by the individual chickens as they make the free-living antibodies. ) So then, what is going on?

When a chicken first makes any antibody – either antibody made in the free-living phase or antibody made by inbreeding – it will make about half as many antibodies as it would if it had been made from new antibodies made in the serum. For both these antibodies, these newly made antibodies will have half as many molecules bound to them as the antibodies which were originally made by the individual chicken when making free-living antibodies.

So you are correct. The chicken starts making the antibodies to it's free-living antibodies, then they work out how many molecules of those original free-living antibodies they will have to make new antibodies. Some of them won't even know they've made new antibodies. The moment they start binding and doing their stuff to proteins, they don't know that they made new antibodies at all.

When you make antibodies from a population of fresh chicken egg yolks, each is a completely new antibody being made and thus new. So you would say we've made 300 antibodies from one egg. Each of those antibodies was made half as long as when the new population of antibodies were made from a new batch of free-living antibodies.

A big part of this is the time that chicken egg antibodies make their journey to the outside world. The antibodies get cut up on the inside before they are used for injection.

Releasing an antibody from the outside world can come from any part of the body: heart, liver, lung, skin, bladder, spleen and kidneys in different animals, etc. By that time I would imagine that the antibodies have very few free places to go, and so are getting cut up, or, more commonly, they are being very strongly bound. Some have been very strongly bound and do not give any antibody anymore. In other cases the antibodies have completely been bound by other proteins which have very strong affinity for them.

In both those cases, there are antibodies left over.