Synthetic Antibody Gene Libraries for In Vitro Affinity Maturation

The application of phage display to the screening of antibody V-gene libraries promises to replace animal immunization and hybridoma technology as a means of antibody generation (1 ,2 ). Synthetic libraries offer the potential for expanding the immune system repertoire and designing libraries for particular sets of antigens. We have developed a method for the generation of synthetic antibody gene libraries by which spiked oligonucleotides are assembled by a ligase chain reaction protocol (3 ). This is a synthetic adaptation of a reaction that was previously used as a diagnostic tool (4 ,5 ).