Marine Fish Immunology

Since the development of the monoclonal antibody technique, these proteins have become an essential tool for diagnosis and therapy on the biomedical field, but also on many other applications such as in the marine field. However, this technique presents several disadvantages such as the hibridoma instability, the necessity of animal facilities and frequent low response against some antigens. The display of single chain variable fragment (scFv) antibodies on the surface of filamentous phages can be a very nice alternative to overcome all these problems. In this work, we present for the first time, the use of a human phage library to obtain scFv against turbot blood cells. After four rounds of panning and selection against turbot peripheral blood mononuclear cells, several individual clones were isolated. Their specificity was analyzed using several immunological techniques including flow cytometry on cells from several tissues. We selected the monoclonal phage-scFv P2B2 that specifically recognizes turbot erythrocytes. Our results suggest that phage display libraries provide a valuable method for an easier and faster generation of specific antibody fragments against cellular antigens.