A Rapid Screening Assay for Blood Group Specificity of Monoclonal Antibodies Using the Microtiter Plate System

Abstract

When producing monoclonal antibodies of blood group specificity it is important to screen as early as possible and rapidly hundreds of hybridoma supernatants on antibody activity and specificity. The standard techniques for erythrocyte antibody screening and identification are time consuming and expensive. Therefore, we tested the microtiter plate system which was adapted to blood grouping firstly by Wegmann and Smithies in 1966 (10), using V-bottom wells. In 1970 Crawford et al. (2) used U-bottom wells and modified the microtiter plate system for antibody screening and identification, titration and cell typing. Since then, this microtiter hemagglutination method has achieved increasing importance(1,7,9). The method is simple, rapid, economic and makes it possible to read, interprete and record automatically the agglutination reactions. The advantages of the microtiter hemagglutination method are demonstrated by rapid detection and isolation of antigen-positive hybridomas after fusion and final cloning. Our experience with this method is based upon more than 40.000 reactions.