Recombinant antibody technology: from plain phage display panning to complex combined approaches

Recombinant antibody technology is considered a fast and inexpensive method to recover new binders. It is also acknowledged that it enables to expand the repertoire represented by natural binders issued from immunization. This improvement can be realized by forcing the system at different levels: i) design of the library in terms of dimension and structural characteristics; ii) panning and screening conditions for selecting antibodies with specific biophysical features; iii) in vitro and in silico maturation procedures paired to molecular engineering for optimizing the binders in the function of their final applications.

In many cases, the advancement in this research field has been the consequence of applying in creative form combinations of methodologies which initially developed separately. Examples are the alternate use of phage and yeast/ribosomal/bacterial display, the introduction of rational mutagenesis based on computational modeling to optimize the initial hits recovered by conventional panning, the use of automated systems that allow the analysis of huge amounts of biochemical (from ELISA, flow-cytometry, affinity measurement) and NGS data. These approaches simplified the isolation of antibodies for difficult targets (membrane proteins, toxic and non-immunogenic targets), specific applications (structural chaperones, allosteric inhibitors, detectors of structural conformation), and better biophysical characteristics (higher stability and yields, stronger and more selective binding, lower immunogenicity).

This special issue presents significant examples of some of these achievements and therefore should inspire to further challenge the potential of recombinant antibody technology.

Edited by Ario de Marco, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. If you are interested in contributing to the Special Issue, please contact the Editor: Ario.DeMarco@ung.si.

Content Type:Review
Beyond antibody engineering: directed evolution of alternative binding scaffolds and enzymes using yeast surface display
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Authors:Doreen Könning and Harald Kolmar
Citation:Microbial Cell Factories 2018 17:32
Published on: 26 February 2018
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Content Type:Research
Isolation of anti-extra-cellular vesicle single-domain antibodies by direct panning on vesicle-enriched fractions
The thorough understanding of the physiological and pathological processes mediated by extracellular vesicles (EVs) is challenged by purification methods which are cumbersome, not reproducible, or insufficient...
Authors:Milica Popovic, Elisa Mazzega, Barbara Toffoletto and Ario de Marco
Citation:Microbial Cell Factories 2018 17:6
Published on: 13 January 2018
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Content Type:RESEARCH
A novel one-step approach for the construction of yeast surface display Fab antibody libraries
Yeast surface display (YSD) has proven to be a versatile platform technology for antibody discovery. However, the construction of antibody Fab libraries typically is a tedious three-step process that involves ...
Authors:Simon Rosowski, Stefan Becker, Lars Toleikis, Bernhard Valldorf, Julius Grzeschik, Deniz Demir, Iris Willenbücher, Ramona Gaa, Harald Kolmar, Stefan Zielonka and Simon Krah
Citation:Microbial Cell Factories 2018 17:3
Published on: 9 January 2018
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Content Type:RESEARCH
Selection, characterization, and thermal stabilization of llama single domain antibodies towards Ebola virus glycoprotein
A key advantage of recombinant antibody technology is the ability to optimize and tailor reagents. Single domain antibodies (sdAbs), the recombinantly produced variable domains derived from camelid and shark h...
Authors:Jinny L. Liu, Lisa C. Shriver-Lake, George P. Anderson, Dan Zabetakis and Ellen R. Goldman
Citation:Microbial Cell Factories 2017 16:223
Published on: 12 December 2017
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