Timo Pulli

Automated Panning and Screening Procedure on Microplates for Antibody Generation from Phage Display Libraries

Antibody phage display technology is well established and widely used for selecting specific antibodies against desired targets. Using conventional manual methods, it is laborious to perform multiple selections with different antigens simultaneously. Furthermore, manual screening of the positive clones requires much effort. The authors describe optimized and automated procedures of these processes using a magnetic bead processor for the selection and a robotic station for the screening step. Both steps are performed in a 96-well microplate format. In addition, adopting the antibody phage display technology to automated platform polyethylene glycol precipitation of the enriched phage pool was unnecessary. For screening, an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay protocol suitable for a robotic station was developed. This system was set up using human γ-globulin as a model antigen to select antibodies from a VTT naive human single-chain antibody (scFv) library. In total, 161 γ-globulin-selected clones were screened, and according to fingerprinting analysis, 9 of the 13 analyzed clones were different. The system was further tested using testosterone bovine serum albumin (BSA) and β-estradiol-BSA as antigens with the same library. In total, 1536 clones were screened from 4 rounds of selection with both antigens, and 29 different testosterone-BSA and 23 β-estradiol-BSA binding clones were found and verified by sequencing. This automated antibody phage display procedure increases the throughput of generating wide panels of target-binding antibody candidates and allows the selection and screening of antibodies against several different targets in parallel with high efficiency. (Journal of Biomolecular Screening 2009:282-293)

A structural insight into the molecular recognition of a (-)-Delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol and the development of a sensitive, one-step, homogeneous immunocomplex-based assay for its detection

(-)-Delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the main psychoactive compound found in cannabis. In this study, an anti-THC Fab fragment, designed T3, was isolated from a display library cloned from the spleen cells of a mouse immunized with a THC-bovine serum albumin conjugate, and the crystal structures of the T3 Fab in its free form and in complex with THC were determined at 1.9 A and 2.0 A resolution, respectively. The THC binding site of the T3 Fab is a narrow cavity: the n-pentyl group of THC protrudes deep into the interface area between the variable domains and the C(10) monoterpene moiety of the hapten is partially exposed to solvent. The metabolites of THC, with modifications in the C(10) monoterpene moiety, 11-nor-9-carboxy-Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol and 11-hydroxy-?(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol, are bound by the T3 Fab with a higher affinity than THC. The crystal structures suggest that Ser52H and Arg53H of the T3 Fab are able to make hydrogen bonds with the metabolites, which leads to an increased binding against these metabolites. By developing a T3 Fab-Delta(9)-THC immunocomplex binding antibody from a naïve antibody phage display library, the specificity of the Delta(9)-THC binding is highly increased, which allows a one-step, homogeneous, fluorescence resonance energy transfer-based sensitive immunoassay, with a detection limit of 20 ng/ml from saliva samples.

Fluorescence-based fast diagnostics platform for the direct and indirect immunodiagnostic analysis methods

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed two reader prototypes for immunodiagnostic tests. VTT has also developed a one-step, homogeneous noncompetitive immunoassay for small analytes using recombinant antibodies and morphine as the model analyte. VTT developed reader for lateral flow test. Lateral flow test is a strip, which has a sample area and a detection area. In the sample area there are antibodies attached to gold or fluorescence particles, which are captured into the detection area, if a sample has a desired analyte. The concentration of the measured sample is then calculated from the fluorescence detection or color change. The second developed prototype reader is based on Time Resolved Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (TR-FRET). In this reader samples are put on microwell array. There are two fluorophores in each of the wells and emission of both fluorophores is measured. The sample concentration is calculated from these emission signals. The optimization of homogenous FRET assays for morphine was included to this project. The first results obtained with the TR-FRET reader prototype show that the sensitivity of the current morphine test is clearly adequate.