Technology - Phenotype-genotype coupling

The natural antibody repertoire represents a prime library to find antibody leads for diagnostic, therapeutic and research applications. Whilst many technologies exist that enable the screening and mining of the antibody repertoire for antigen binding, the in-depth phenotypic characterization (affinity, specificity) of the antibodies is done usually after selection and sequencing, and expression systems are needed. This laborious process represents a bottleneck if many sequences need to be assayed. A much more directed approach includes the characterization of the antibodies in front of sequencing, to only select antibodies with preferable biophysical properties. We deploy double emulsion droplet sorting methodologies to enrich for the phenotype of interest, and to directly link single-cell phenotyping experiments to single-cell sequencing experiments.