Abstract
Human antibodies are the most important class of biologicals, and antibodies – human and nonhuman – are indispensable as research agents and for diagnostic assays. When generating antibodies, they sometimes show the desired specificity profile but lack sufficient affinity for the desired application. In this article, a phage display-based method and protocol to increase the affinity of recombinant antibody fragments is given.
The given protocol starts with the construction of a mutated antibody gene library by error-prone PCR. Subsequently, the selection of high-affinity variants is performed by panning on immobilized antigen with washing conditions optimized for off-rate-dependent selection. A screening ELISA protocol to identify antibodies with improved affinity and an additional protocol to select antibodies with improved thermal stability is described.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ecker DM, Crawford TJ, Seymour P (2020) The therapeutic monoclonal antibody product market. BioProcess Int 18
Lu R-M, Hwang Y-C, Liu I-J et al (2020) Development of therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of diseases. J Biomed Sci 27:1
Finlay WJJ, Bloom L, Cunningham O (2011) Phage display: a powerful technology for the generation of high specificity affinity reagents from alternative immune sources. Methods Mol Biol 681:87 –101
Tiller T, Schuster I, Deppe D et al (2013) A fully synthetic human Fab antibody library based on fixed VH/VL framework pairings with favorable biophysical properties. MAbs 5:445 –470
Pantazes RJ, Maranas CD (2013) MAPs: a database of modular antibody parts for predicting tertiary structures and designing affinity matured antibodies. BMC Bioinf 14:168
Tomszak F, Weber S, Zantow J et al (2016) Selection of recombinant human antibodies. In: Protein targeting compounds. Springer, Cham, pp 23–54
McCafferty J (1996) Phage display: factors affecting panning efficiency. In: Phage display of peptides and proteins. Elsevier, London, pp 261–276
Douthwaite JA, Sridharan S, Huntington C et al (2015) Affinity maturation of a novel antagonistic human monoclonal antibody with a long VH CDR3 targeting the Class A GPCR formyl-peptide receptor 1. MAbs 7:152 –166
Li B, Fouts AE, Stengel K et al (2014) In vitro affinity maturation of a natural human antibody overcomes a barrier to in vivo affinity maturation. MAbs 6:437 –445
Lamdan H, Gavilondo JV, Muñoz Y et al (2013) Affinity maturation and fine functional mapping of an antibody fragment against a novel neutralizing epitope on human vascular endothelial growth factor. Mol BioSyst 9:2097 –2106
Lou J, Geren I, Garcia-Rodriguez C et al (2010) Affinity maturation of human botulinum neurotoxin antibodies by light chain shuffling via yeast mating. Protein Eng Des Sel 23:311 –319
Yoshinaga K, Matsumoto M, Torikai M et al (2008) Ig L-chain shuffling for affinity maturation of phage library-derived human anti-human MCP-1 antibody blocking its chemotactic activity. J Biochem 143:593 –601
Ohlin M, Owman H, Mach M et al (1996) Light chain shuffling of a high affinity antibody results in a drift in epitope recognition. Mol Immunol 33:47 –56
Teixeira AAR, D’Angelo S, Erasmus MF et al (2022) Simultaneous affinity maturation and developability enhancement using natural liability-free CDRs. MAbs 14:2115200
Rajpal A, Beyaz N, Haber L et al (2005) A general method for greatly improving the affinity of antibodies by using combinatorial libraries. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 102:8466 –8471
Liu J-L, Hu Z-Q, Xing S et al (2012) Attainment of 15-fold higher affinity of a Fusarium-specific single-chain antibody by directed molecular evolution coupled to phage display. Mol Biotechnol 52:111 –122
Low NM, Holliger PH, Winter G (1996) Mimicking somatic hypermutation: affinity maturation of antibodies displayed on bacteriophage using a bacterial mutator strain. J Mol Biol 260:359 –368
Laffly E, Pelat T, Cédrone F et al (2008) Improvement of an antibody neutralizing the anthrax toxin by simultaneous mutagenesis of its six hypervariable loops. J Mol Biol 378:1094 –1103
Chowdhury PS (2002) Targeting random mutations to hotspots in antibody variable domains for affinity improvement. Methods Mol Biol 178:269 –285
Renaut L, Monnet C, Dubreuil O et al (2012) Affinity maturation of antibodies: optimized methods to generate high-quality ScFv libraries and isolate IgG candidates by high-throughput screening. Methods Mol Biol 907:451 –461
Hust M, Frenzel A, Schirrmann T et al (2014) Selection of recombinant antibodies from antibody gene libraries. Methods Mol Biol 1101:305 –320
Thie H, Toleikis L, Li J et al (2011) Rise and fall of an anti-MUC1 specific antibody. PLoS One 6:e15921
Schier R, Bye J, Apell G et al (1996) Isolation of high-affinity monomeric human anti-c-erbB-2 single chain Fv using affinity-driven selection. J Mol Biol 255:28 –43
Unkauf T, Hust M, Frenzel A (2018) Antibody affinity and stability maturation by error-prone PCR. Methods Mol Biol 1701:393 –407
Friguet B, Chaffotte AF, Djavadi-Ohaniance L et al (1985) Measurements of the true affinity constant in solution of antigen-antibody complexes by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. J Immunol Methods 77:305 –319
Della Ducata D, Jaehrling J, Hänel C et al (2015) Solution equilibrium titration for high-throughput affinity estimation of unpurified antibodies and antibody fragments. J Biomol Screen 20:1256 –1267
Russo G, Theisen U, Fahr W et al (2018) Sequence defined antibodies improve the detection of cadherin 2 (N-cadherin) during zebrafish development. New Biotechnol 45:98 –112
Vernet T, Choulier L, Nominé Y et al (2015) Spot peptide arrays and SPR measurements: throughput and quantification in antibody selectivity studies. J Mol Recognit 28:635 –644
Knowling S, Clark J, Sjuts H et al (2020) Direct comparison of label-free biosensor binding kinetics obtained on the biacore 8K and the carterra LSA. SLAS Discov 25:977 –984
Schütte M, Thullier P, Pelat T et al (2009) Identification of a putative Crf splice variant and generation of recombinant antibodies for the specific detection of Aspergillus fumigatus. PLoS One 4:e6625
Wenzel EV, Bosnak M, Tierney R et al (2020) Human antibodies neutralizing diphtheria toxin in vitro and in vivo. Sci Rep 10:571
Bertoglio F, Fühner V, Ruschig M et al (2021) A SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibody selected from COVID-19 patients binds to the ACE2-RBD interface and is tolerant to most known RBD mutations. Cell Rep 36:109433
Hust M, Toleikis L, Dübel S (2007) Handbook of therapeutic antibodies. In: Dübel S (ed) Antibody phage display. Willey-VCH-Verlag, Weinheim
Kügler J, Wilke S, Meier D et al (2015) Generation and analysis of the improved human HAL9/10 antibody phage display libraries. BMC Biotechnol 15:10
Barbas CF, Burton DR, Scott JK et al (2001) Phage display. A laboratory manual. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor
Russo G, Unkauf T, Meier D et al (2022) In vitro evolution of myc-tag antibodies: in-depth specificity and affinity analysis of Myc1-9E10 and Hyper-Myc. Biol Chem 403:479 –494
Welschof M, Terness P, Kipriyanov SM et al (1997) The antigen-binding domain of a human IgG-anti-F(ab′)2 autoantibody. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 94:1902 –1907
Soltes G, Hust M, Ng KKY et al (2007) On the influence of vector design on antibody phage display. J Biotechnol 127:626 –637
Rondot S, Koch J, Breitling F et al (2001) A helper phage to improve single-chain antibody presentation in phage display. Nat Biotechnol 19:75 –78
Goletz S, Christensen PA, Kristensen P et al (2002) Selection of large diversities of antiidiotypic antibody fragments by phage display. J Mol Biol 315:1087 –1097
Finnern R, Pedrollo E, Fisch I et al (1997) Human autoimmune anti-proteinase 3 scFv from a phage display library. Clin Exp Immunol 107:269 –281
Mersmann M, Schmidt A, Tesar M et al (1998) Monitoring of scFv selected by phage display using detection of scFv-pIII fusion proteins in a microtiter scale assay. J Immunol Methods 220:51 –58
Acknowledgments
This review is an updated and revised version with improved protocols of [24].
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Langreder, N. et al. (2023). Antibody Affinity and Stability Maturation by Error-Prone PCR. In: Hust, M., Lim, T.S. (eds) Phage Display. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2702. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3381-6_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3381-6_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-0716-3380-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-0716-3381-6
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols