Lab - Comparative electrophoresis of immunized and non-immunized rabbits

Excerpt B.O. :
Terminal S: Maintaining the integrity of the organism: some aspects of the immune response.
The immune phenotype throughout life.

Scientific issue:
Some diseases cannot be caught twice (e.g., childhood diseases), others can be prevented by vaccination. In both cases, contact with various infectious agents allows the body to develop
a lasting immunity, or immune memory, against them. How does this memory manifest in the context of adaptive immunity?

Procedure:
The proposed activity allows for addressing the concept of immune memory, essential for understanding the importance of vaccination strategy. To do this, animal models are used, such as rabbits, in which the injection of an antigen triggers immune reactions. These reactions lead to the production of antibodies present in the serum and detectable by electrophoresis.
The objective is to perform electrophoresis of the serum from two rabbits to whom an antigen (BSA) was injected a few days earlier. One of the rabbits had already had a prior contact with this same antigen (immunized rabbit), the other had not (non-immunized rabbit), in order to observe the higher presence of gamma-globulins in the serum of the first animal.