Oligonucleotide-assisted cleavage and ligation: a novel directional DNA cloning technology to capture cDNAs. Application in the construction of a human immune antibody phage-display library.

The use of oligonucleotide-assisted cleavage and ligation (ONCL), a novel approach to the capture of gene repertoires, in the construction of a phage-display immune antibody library is described. ONCL begins with rapid amplification of cDNA ends to amplify all members equally. A single, specific cut near 50 and/ or 30 end of each gene fragment ( in single stranded form) is facilitated by hybridization with an appropriate oligonucleotide adapter. Directional cloning of targeted DNA is accomplished by ligation of a partially duplex DNA molecule ( containing suitable restriction sites) and amplification with primers in constant regions. To demonstrate utility and reliability of ONCL, a human antibody repertoire was cloned from IgG mRNA extracted from human B-lymphocytes engrafted in Trimera mice. These mice were transplanted with peripheral blood lymphocytes from Candida albicans infected individuals and subsequently immunized with C. albicans glyceraldehyde-3- phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH). DNA sequencing showed that ONCL resulted in efficient capture of gene repertoires. Indeed, full representation of all V-H families/ segments was observed showing that ONCL did not introduce cloning biases for or against any VH family. We validated the efficiency of ONCL by creating a functional Fab phage-display library with a size of 3.3 x 10(10) and by selecting five unique Fabs against GAPDH antigen.