Randox Life Sciences is a manufacturer of high-quality, cost-effective human recombinant proteins, recombinant antibody fragments and polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies.
The company's range of life-science products can be utilised in a number of applications, including Elisa, western blot analysis, immunofluorescence and immunohistochemistry.
New recombinant antibody fragments from Randox include: Norketamine; FABP (heart sub-type); Haptoglobin Beta Chain; IL18; ICAM; L-Selectin; Soluble VEGFR1; p53; TSH Beta Chain; TSH/LH/FSH/HCG alpha chain; PAI-1; Hepatitis B - Surface Antigen; and Tetanus Toxoid.
Single-chain Fvs (scFvs) are recombinant antibody fragments, which commonly consist of a full variable (epitope-binding) region of an immunoglobulin heavy chain covalently linked to the corresponding variable region of an immunoglobulin light chain.
These regions are usually expressed as a single continuous sequence, which may or may not be separated by a short linking amino acid sequence.
One of the main advantages of the scFv fragment is that it is essentially a minimal version of an IgG molecule.
Despite its reduced size, the fragment still retains full activity, specificity and stability.
When used on Elisa, immuno-bead or biochip surfaces, the reduced size of the scFv fragment allows for more densely packed coating of the fragment's binding regions (CDRs), therefore giving higher potential array sensitivities.
Additionally, due to the removal of the entire immunoglobulin Fc region there is reduced likelihood of observing interference from secondary antibodies or from the well-known phenomenon of Human Anti-Mouse Antibody (HAMA) interference, which can occur in assays testing serum samples.
ScFv fragments are artificially engineered sequences, which are commonly expressed in secondary hosts such as E.
coli, yeast or Chinese Hamster Ovarian (CHO) cells.
The chains can therefore be easily adapted and altered for use in specialised applications.
Randox Life Sciences has pioneered the use of specialised proprietary functional expression tags, which are designed to aid directed immobilisation and conjugation of scFv fragments for use as capture and detection ligands in biochip-based assays.
ScFv fragments can also be processed through rounds of affinity maturation to increase their functional sensitivities and can be expressed in higher valency formats as dimeric, trimeric and even tetrameric fragments in order to increase their functional avidity.
Randox Life Sciences now offers a catalogue of in-house manufactured scFv products and can also provide a custom service for the isolation and production of novel scFv fragments upon request.