Synthetic Antibody Libraries

Antibody fragments have gained strong attention in the last years and presumably represent one of the most promising molecules to construct new types of therapeutic proteins. Contrary to complete IgG, antibody fragments like scFv are not very stable and are frequently expressed at a very low level. This has prompted the development of new phage-displayed antibody libraries based on optimized scFv frameworks. In this protocol, we will present the construction of such a library based on a single scFv framework with randomized CDR3 sequences. Many variations of this basic protocol are possible and discussed.