Hapten mediated display and pairing of recombinant antibodies accelerates assay assembly for biothreat countermeasures

Abstract

A bottle-neck in recombinant antibody sandwich immunoassay development is pairing, demanding protein purification and modification to distinguish captor from tracer. We developed a simple pairing scheme using microliter amounts of E. coli osmotic shockates bearing site-specific biotinylated antibodies and demonstrated proof of principle with a single domain antibody (sdAb) that is both captor and tracer for polyvalent Marburgvirus nucleoprotein. The system could also host pairs of different sdAb specific for the 7 botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) serotypes, enabling recognition of the cognate serotype. Inducible supE co-expression enabled sdAb populations to be propagated as either phage for more panning from repertoires or expressed as soluble sdAb for screening within a single host strain. When combined with streptavidin-g3p fusions, a novel transdisplay system was formulated to retrofit a semi-synthetic sdAb library which was mined for an anti-Ebolavirus sdAb which was immediately immunoassay ready, thereby speeding up the recombinant antibody discovery and utilization processes.