Facile and Modular Pipeline for Protein-Specific Antibody Customization

Antibodies are fundamental tools for basic science; however, high-quality antibodies suitable for multiple experimental applications are often inaccessible to research laboratories. To this end, a modular and low-cost pipeline for small-scale antibody customization is developed. First, soluble antigens are designed according to the secondary structure of a desired protein. Then, the antigens are efficiently displayed on a modular nanoplatform by intein-mediated trans-splicing (TS) that enables elicitation of high titers of protein-specific antibodies. After that, target antibodies are obtained by a modular HaloLink resin platform with antigens as the ligand that is devised by intein-mediated TS. Finally, purified antibodies show excellent properties in immunofluorescence, immunoprecipitation, and western blotting assays. Overall, these results suggest that the proposed pipeline is amenable to the generation of high-quality, research-grade antibodies and to aid in protein functional studies.