A major human thyroglobulin epitope defined with monoclonal antibodies is mainly recognized by human autoantibodies

The antigenic nature of 15 anti-human thyroglobulin (hTg) monoclonal antibody (mAb) epitopes was studied by two different approaches. First, we tested two successive protease-digest products of hTg. Only four mAb from the same cluster of reactivity recognized a low-molecular weight peptide, the other mAb only bound native hTg of high-molecular weight digest fractions. Second, these 15 mAb were used to immunoscreen hTg expression libraries