Generation of Rabbit Immune Libraries

Rabbits provide an interesting alternative to antibodies derived from the murine system. Furthermore, rabbits show an exceptional feature with respect to the mechanisms that are used for the generation of antibody diversity, i.e. a single VH gene that is preferentially used, and the diversity of the antibody repertoire being mainly generated by gene conversion and hypermutation, which facilitates the molecular cloning of the rabbit immune repertoire. In this chapter, the general strategy for the combinatorial cloning of the variable heavy and light chain immunoglobulin repertoire of rabbits for the subsequent phage display of rabbit scFv antibody fragments is described.