Broadening the Impact of Antibody Phage Display Technology: Amplification of Immunoglobulin Sequences from Species Other than Humans or Mice

The production of monoclonal antibodies (MAb) through the immortalization of B lymphocytes has generally had little impact beyond human and murine immunology. This can be explained by the lack of appropriate myeloma lines or transforming viruses for species outside this select group and the instability of heterohydridoma cell lines generated with, for example, murine myeloma lines (1 ). The advent of Ab phage-display technology offers a solution to this problem: success pivots upon the ability to recovery the immunoglobulin (Ig) repertoire from a source of B-lymphocyte mRNA and to construct representative display libraries from the encoded proteins for screening. In many species, understanding of the basis to Ig formation is now sufficiently detailed for the application of these methods to MAb isolation.