Multiple-antigen immunization of chickens facilitates the generation of recombinant antibodies to autoantigens

Antibody phage display is a powerful tool for the generation of monoclonal antibodies against virtually any given antigen. Chickens are phylogenetically more distant from humans compared to other laboratory animals, such as mice and rats. Therefore, the use of chickens is especially beneficial when generating recombinant antibodies against human autoantigens, which are often highly conserved among mammals. Another advantage of using chickens in antibody phage display is that the preparation of single chain variable fragment (scFv) antibody libraries is faster and easier compared to preparing such libraries from other species, as only two primer sets are needed for amplification of the chicken variable heavy chain (V(H)) and variable light chain (V(L)) genes. In the present study we explored the possibility to immunize chickens with antigen cocktails for the generation of recombinant antibody fragments directed to a range of human autoantigens. Two pairs of chickens were immunized with two cocktails of seven recombinant autoantigenic proteins, libraries were prepared and panned on the individual proteins. The polyclonal chicken sera reacted strongly with most of the antigens used for immunization. By creating and screening single-chain variable fragment antibody phage display libraries, recombinant monoclonal antibody fragments were isolated successfully against the autoantigens annexin XI, centromere protein B, heat shock protein B3, DNA topoisomerase I, histidyl tRNA synthetase, Ro52, Ro60, Rpp30 and U1A. In conclusion, the immunization of only four chickens with two distinct pools of a total of 14 autoantigenic proteins allowed the isolation of scFvs against nine of these antigens.