Improved microtitre plate production of single chain Fv fragments in Escherichia coli

The new era of functional genomics demands several antibodies as specific detection reagents for proteins, their complexes and post-translational modifications. Only in vitro antibody selection technologies are able to provide the required throughput to generate these large numbers. Phage display is the most widely used technology for in vitro selection of antibodies. The major bottleneck of a phage display selection pipeline is the production of monoclonal antibody fragments for screening and further analysis. In this study, we describe the development of improved protocols for the production of single chain Fv (scFv) antibody fragments in 96-well microtitre plates (MTPs) in Escherichia coli. Four scFvs were expressed using the antibody expression vector pOPE101-XP to analyse the influence of a set of different parameters on their production. Further, six scFvs were expressed using the phage display vector pHAL14 to investigate the effect on the production of functional scFvs using those parameters that improved production from pOPE101-XP. Yield in MTPs was influenced by a variety of conditions and was also strongly dependent on the individual scFv clone. Although it was not possible to deduce a single set of optimal parameters applicable to all the tested scFvs, a combined protocol was developed which improved the expression of scFv fragments over standard methods.