Recombinant monoclonal antibodies are established by screening the antibody libraries. To obtain antibodies with a high specificity and affinity, an efficient screening process with a highly diverse library including low background signals is necessary. One of the most extensively used methods is the phage display method. Although phage display screening is a powerful tool for enriching clones from vast libraries, it is not easy to identify single clones with an antigen recognition function only through several rounds of biopanning. The application of colony assays for screening antibody libraries can identify clones with a high reliability by a direct observation of the antibody-antigen binding during the screening process; however, the size of the library that can be dealt with is limited. This chapter describes the colony assay as a current screening technology used in recombinant monoclonal antibody production, the possible problems in this method, and discusses the outlook for this technology.
Part of the book: Antibody Engineering