THE NATURE OF THE FORCES BETWEEN ANTIGEN AND ANTIBODY AND OF THE PRECIPITATION REACTION

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Abstract
"The forces responsible for combination and attraction of antigen and antibody molecules may be classified as electronic van der Waals attraction, Coulomb attraction, attraction of electric dipoles or multipoles, formation of hydrogen bonds, etc. The specificity of interaction of antigen and antibody molecules arises from their structural complementariness, which permits close contact of the molecules over sufficient area for these weak forces to co-operate in forming a strong antigen-antibody bond. The weight of evidence indicates that further combination of the initial antigen-antibody complexes to form a precipitate is a specific rather than a nonspecific reaction and is due to a continuation of the primary combination step to form a framework structure of alternate antigen and antibody molecules. Furthermore, it appears that both precipitating antigen and precipitating antibody must be multivalent, at least bivalent. The more recent quantitative theories of the precipitation reaction are discussed.".