Construction of a large naïve human phage-displayed Fab library through one-step cloning

Antibody-based therapeutics is attracting more attention in the post-genome era, in contrast to a diminution in the initial high expectation for rapid development of gene-based therapeutic modalities. In support to the antibody-based therapeutics, the advent of recent technologies has made human antibody screening and production progressively more economic. Among those technologies, phage-display antibody library has been successfully applied in the antibody-based drug development both as fully human antibody sources and tools for antibody engineering. Building up a high-quality antibody library with a large library size and high diversity has been crucial for successful isolation of antibodies. Here we describe an efficient strategy for the construction of a large naïve phage-display human Fab library with one-step cloning. Optimization of each key step is extensively discussed and simplified protocols for library panning and Fab production are also described.