Advantages of using Monoclonal Antibodies:

• Hybridoma serves as an immortal source of monoclonal antibody.
• Same quality of the antibody is maintained amongst the different production batches.
• Highly reproducible and scalable, unlimited production source.
• Speed and sensitivity and specificity of assays.
• Can produce antibodies when needed.
• No need to worry about maintaining the animals.
• Antigen or immunogen need not be pure.

• Selection helps to identify the right clones against the specific antigen

Disadvantages of using Monoclonal Antibodies:

• Time consuming project - anwhere between 6 months -9 months.

• Very expensive and needs considerable effort to produce them.

• Small peptide and fragment antigens may not be good antigens-monoclonal antibody may not recognize the original antigen.

• Hybridoma culture may be subject to contamination.
• System is only well developed for mouse and rat and not for other animals.
• More than 99% of the cells do not survive during the fusion process – reducing the range of useful antibodies that can be produced against an antigen

Advantages of Using Polyclonal Antibodies:

• Production is quicker.
• Less expensive.
• Have choice of producing antibodies in different animals.
• Chances of getting a better response to the antigen is increased– can try different animal sources as antibody produced recognizes different epitopes on the same antigen.
• Relatively easy to purify using affinity chromatography methods.

Disadvantages of using Polyclonal antibodies:

• Increased chance for cross reaction – false positives.
• Non specific interaction with the antigen- considerable heterogeneity within the antibody pool.
• Life span of the host animal is limited.
• Multiple animals had to be immunized against the same antigen.
• Antibody response depends on the host animal.
• Sometimes requires multiple control samples to arrive at meaningful conclusions