Microbial Cell Factories

Recombinant antibody technology is considered a fast and inexpensive method to recover new binders. It is also acknowledged that it enables to expand the repertoire represented by natural binders issued from immunization.  This improvement can be realized by forcing the system at different levels: i) design of the library in terms of dimension and structural characteristics; ii) panning and screening conditions for selecting antibodies with specific biophysical features; iii) in vitro and in silico maturation procedures paired to molecular engineering for optimizing the binders in the function of their final applications.

In many cases, the advancement in this research field has been the consequence of applying in creative form combinations of methodologies which initially developed separately. Examples are the alternate use of phage and yeast/ribosomal/bacterial display, the introduction of rational mutagenesis based on computational modeling to optimize the initial hits recovered by conventional panning, the use of automated systems that allow the analysis of huge amounts of biochemical (from ELISA, flow-cytometry, affinity measurement) and NGS data. These approaches simplified the isolation of antibodies for difficult targets (membrane proteins, toxic and non-immunogenic targets), specific applications (structural chaperones, allosteric inhibitors, detectors of structural conformation), and better biophysical characteristics (higher stability and yields, stronger and more selective binding, lower immunogenicity).

Edited by Ario de Marco, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. If you are interested in contributing to the Special Issue, please contact the Editor: Ario.DeMarco@ung.si.

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Microbial Cell Factories is an open access peer-reviewed journal that covers any topic related to the development, use and investigation of microbial cells as producers of recombinant proteins and natural products, or as catalyzers of biological transformations of industrial interest. Microbial Cell Factories is the world leading, primary research journal fully focusing on Applied Microbiology.

The journal is divided into the following editorial sections:

Metabolic engineering
Synthetic biology
Whole-cell biocatalysis
Microbial regulations
Recombinant protein production/bioprocessing
Production of natural compounds
Systems biology of cell factories
Microbial production processes
Cell-free systems