MRC's antibody arrays

While high-throughput small molecule screening is becoming a staple of many drug discovery engines, analogous technologies for antibody screening have been less numerous. Thus the development of a system for high-throughput screening of antibody-antigen interactions by researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and colleagues could represent a new method for identifying both therapeutic targets and antibodies.

As published in Nature Biotechnology, MRC researchers created antibody arrays via the robotic picking and high-density gridding of bacterial clones expressing antibody genes. The bacterial antibody arrays were screened using filter-based ELISA immunoassays to identify clones expressing antibodies of interest or to analyze differential protein expression. The researchers noted that the approach allows screening of up to 18,342 antibody clones against 15 different antigens simultaneously...