Allergen-Specific Antibodies

Dear Colleagues,

It is with particular joy that I have accepted the opportunity to perform as guest editor for this thematic issue of the journal on Allergen-Specific Antibodies. I have spent my professional career dealing with the clinical consequences of IgE antibody formation when the targets have NOT been parasite-specific proteins, and while our ability to measure these problematic antibodies has gotten progressively more sophisticated and reliable from a chemist’s perspective, we are still daunted by the task of understanding how these remarkable molecules are regulated, and their targets selected by the human immune system. Recent advances moving in the direction of resolved components have yielded some new insights into the relationship between proteins from natural allergenic sources that are merely targets for IgE antibody formation and those that tend to produce much more profound immune responses in terms of the ability to trigger mediator-containing cells to release the chemicals producing the acute allergic tissue reaction. However, our understanding remains rudimentary at best, and thus far applies to only a few of the most widely prevalent allergens.

Recent studies suggest that the remarkable increase in incidence of allergic disease that has been observed only in Western, industrialized cultures may be a reflection of distortions which this lifestyle tends to produce in the microbiome. But the questions of exactly what the key elements in the microbiome that stimulate activation of the IgE antibody production process, and whether or not specific distortions in the microbiome may be responsible for which allergen-specific antibody clones get expanded, are all essentially still unknown at this time. It is my hope that we will have the chance to review new work in this issue that may shed some light on these larger questions of regulation and repertoire selection. Lastly, I cannot resist mention of the remarkable and unexpected efficacy of omalizumab monoclonal anti-IgE in the treatment of chronic urticaria, a disorder that most of us have regarded for many years as not being related to usual pathogenetic mechanisms of allergy. Recent work suggests that there may be a broad panoply of self-determinants that we form auto-reactive IgE antibodies against, and these hitherto unexpected targets may play a key role in provocation of the disease. An enormous amount of new work therefore remains to be done, and it is my hope that investigators everywhere will choose to contribute to this thematic issue to advance our science.

Dr. Daniel E. Maddox
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Antibodies is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• allergen-specific IgE
• epitopes
• allergy
• glycation
• anaphylaxis
• mast cells
• basophils
• binding affinity
• repertoire selection
• lipid-transfer proteins
• panallergens
• PR-10 proteins
• venom-specific antibodies
• thaumatin-like proteins