Simple recombinant monoclonal antibody production from Escherichia coli

Antibodies are valuable biological reagents used in a wide range of discovery research, biotechnology, diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Currently both commercial and lab scale antibody production is reliant on expression from mammalian cells, which can be time consuming and requires use of specialist facilities and costly growth reagents. Here we describe a simple, rapid and cheap method for producing and isolating functional monoclonal antibodies and antibody fragments from bacterial cells that can be used in a range of laboratory applications. This simple method only requires access to basic microbial cell culture and molecular biology equipment, making scalable in-house antibody production accessible to the global diagnostics, therapeutics and molecular bioscience research communities.