Cloning single-chain antibody fragments (ScFv) from hyrbidoma cells

Despite the rising impact of the generation of antibodies by phage display and other technologies, hybridoma technology still provides a valuable tool for the generation of high-affinity binders against different targets. But there exist several limitations of using hybridoma-derived antibodies. The source of the hybridoma clones are mostly rat or mouse B-lymphocytes. Therefore a human-anti-mouse or human-anti-rat antibody response may result in immunogenicity of these antibodies. This leads to the necessity of humanization of these antibodies where the knowledge of the amino acid sequence of the proteins is inalienable. Furthermore, additional in vitro modifications, e.g., affinity maturation or fusion to other proteins, are dependent on cloning of the antigen-binding domains.Here we describe the isolation of RNA from hybridoma cells and the primers that can be used for the amplification of VL and VH as well as the cloning of the antibody in scFv format and its expression in Escherichia coli.