Katrin Fischer, Aleksei Lulla, Tsz Y So, Pehuén Pereyra-Gerber, Matthew I. J. Raybould, Timo N. Kohler, Tomasz S. Kaminski, Juan Carlos Yam-Puc, Robert Hughes, Florian Leiß-Maier, Paul Brear, Nicholas J. Matheson,Charlotte M. Deane, Marko Hyvönen, James E. D. Thaventhiran, Florian Hollfelder
BioRxiv, posted 12 Jan 2023
DOI: 10.1101/2023.01.10.523494
PDB coordinates: 8BE1 (3D view)
Plasmids in Addgene: pExp-His-ZBasic-RBD, pExp-His-ZBasic-RBD-Avi
Abstract
Monoclonal antibodies are increasingly used to prevent and treat viral infections, playing a pivotal role in pandemic response efforts. Antibody secreting cells (ASCs, plasma cells and plasmablasts) are an excellent source of high-affinity antibodies with therapeutic potential. Current methodologies to study antigen-specific ASCs either have low throughput, require expensive and labour-intensive screening or are technically demanding and therefore not accessible to the wider research community. Here, we present a straightforward technology for the rapid discovery of monoclonal antibodies from ASCs: we combine microfluidic encapsulation of single cells into an antibody capture hydrogel with antigen bait sorting by conventional flow cytometry. Continue reading →