Yeast Display and Competitive FACS: Powerful Tools for the Selection of Rare Clones from an scFv Library

Recombinant antibodies and novel display technologies have significantly advanced the development of antibodies. However, new techniques are still required to select rare hapten-specific clones from large recombinant libraries. In this chapter, we describe a novel selection procedure for the identification and subsequent isolation of rare, recombinant antibodies from a relatively large immune library (∼ 4.4 × 10⁶). This technique, which combined preselection of an immune phage library with yeast display and competitive FACS, yielded high percentages (20%-40%) of hapten-specific scFvs in the final pool of selected cells.