Development and optimization of a single-step procedure using protein A affinity chromatography to isolate murine IgG1 monoclonal antibodies from hybridoma supernatants.

Protein A affinity chromatography is a standard method of purifying murine monoclonal antibodies (mabs), primarily because it can be performed easily and achieves high-purity levels. Because of its high concentration capacity, it lends itself particularly well to the isolation of mabs from the supernatants of hybridoma cultures. Unfortunately, murine immunoglobulin (Ig) G1 antibodies, a subclass which occurs frequently in the IgG mabs of mice, binds very poorly to protein A, leading to problems in this isolation procedure. For this reason an attempt was made to increase the effectiveness of protein A affinity chromatography in purifying mabs of this IgG subclass by optimizing the binding conditions. The influence of ionic strength, pH and temperature on the binding capacity of a protein A column was studied. The results show the significance of temperature in the binding of the murine IgG1 mab tested to protein A. Further investigations were carried out to optimize the elution conditions and to study the contamination of mab preparations obtained with non-specific bovine protein A reactive Igs originating from culture medium supplement (10% foetal calf serum). An optimized, automatic single-step procedure to obtain highly purified murine IgG1 mabs from hybridoma culture supernatants was developed.