Monoclonal antibodies directed toward metal chelating agents or metal-chelate complexes have many potential uses both in medicine and in environmental analysis. In medicine, chelator-linked antibodies have been used in vivo to transport and deliver radioisotopes to specific target sites, such as tumors (1-3). The availability of monoclonal antibodies to the chelating agent has permitted researchers to investigate the biodistribution of these "magic bullets" in cancer chemotherapy (4). In environmental analysis, the availability of monoclonal antibodies that can distinguish among different metals provides a basis for rapid, sensitive immunoassays that can be used onsite to assess heavy metal contamination (5, 6). Monoclonal antibodies that bind to chelators such as diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid and 1,4,7,10-tetraazacyclododecane-N, NЈ, NЉ, Nٞ-tetraacetic acid have been reported (7, 8); however, these antibodies were directed primarily toward the chelate portion of the molecule and did not demonstrate the ability to differentiate among various metals bound in the chelate complex. Two hybridomas that synthesized monoclonal antibodies showing metal ion specificity have also been reported. The first, CHA255, was the result of immunization with a derivative of In(III)-EDTA coupled to a carrier protein by a thioureido-L-benzyl group (4). The monoclonal antibody synthesized by CHA255 bound to a variety of chelate complexes but bound to indium-chelate complexes more tightly than it did to other chelated metals (4, 9). Monoclonal antibodies directed toward mercuric ions have also been elicited by immunization of animals with a glutathione-Hg derivative (10). These antibodies, which bind to mercury with high affinity, have been used to detect mercuric ions in aqueous samples (6) and are the basis for a commercially available immunoassay to monitor mercury contamination in environmental samples.The molecular features responsible for an antibody's ability to differentiate among metals have been explored in some detail with CHA255 (11). Binding studies have shown that CHA255 was highly specific for the indium chelate; the antibody's affinity decreased from 24-to 20,000-fold when other metals were substituted for In(III) in the chelate complex. The structural basis for this fine discrimination was investigated by x-ray crystallographic analyses of the antigen-binding fragment complexed with either In(III) or Fe(III) chelates of thioureido-L-benzyl-EDTA. A notable feature of the antibodyIn(III)-EDTA complex was the additional coordination of the chelated metal by a histidine residue from the heavy chain's third complementarity determining region. This histidine coordination did not occur in the corresponding Fe(III) complex, due to a slightly different hapten coordination that reduced access to the metal. It was concluded that the absence of the histidine ligation was largely responsible for the 24-fold lower binding of the iron hapten to CHA255 relative to that of the indium hapten. The larger differences in the binding a...