I wonder how I can lyophilize antibodies. Are just monoclonal antibodies lyophilized or polyclonals can also be lyophilized? If just monoclonals are lyophilized, why not polyclonals? Just Curious! Thanks in advance!
Polyclonals can most definitely be lyophilized. As serum proteins that circulate outside of cells they are designed to be tough and withstand more treatments than most proteins. Lyphilizing is done by freezing the sample, preferably quickly and in a thin layer (dry ice ethanol bath), then put the container with frozen sample under vacuum to remove the water. This leaves a dry residue of protein and buffer salts, and can be stored for some time at refrigerator temperatures. Reconstitute to the original volume with deionized water for use.
if you prepare home-made freeze-dried antibodies, don't forget that any moisture in the tube during storage will be very deleterious...
When allowed by the future use, avoid to freeze-dry pure antibodies, albumin or milk can stabilized. By the way, if you'd like to use another buffer for use than the buffer of your Ab purification, you can lyophylize after dialysis against an ammonium chloride buffer. That volatile buffer will disappear during freeze drying.
Another trick, is to had metal salts but this is quite difficult to tuned, and mostly used for large scale production.
At best, expect to loose 20% of your Ab activity. You understand now why low temperature freezers still continue to be used at labs....!
J.
Nobody so far appears to have mentioned the problems that can be caused by salts in the solution. An old fashioned solution is to dialyse the sample against a volatile solvent such as ammonium bicarbonate and then freeze-dry.
Oups, Christopher is right, I miss-typed ammonium chloride instead of ammonium carbonate for that purpose....
J.
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