Antibody Discovery
Monoclonal antibodies are essential for modern drug development and diagnostics. Scientists have traditionally identified antigen-specific monoclonal antibodies with two approaches, each with significant drawbacks that limit the efficiency of antibody discovery.
Screening for Hybridoma Clones entails isolating B cells and fusing them with immortalized myeloma cells. Traditionally, limiting dilutions are used to isolate the desired clones. However, limiting dilution is inherently limited by the Poisson distribution, making this approach highly labor-intensive and time-consuming.
Screening for Antigen-Specific Immune Cells Antigen-specific B cells can be directly isolated by FACS instruments, which sort cells at very high pressure (up to 70 psi), resulting in reduced cell viability. Additionally, these instruments are very difficult to operate and prone to clogging.

Two methods for monoclonal antibody production are depicted above: the creation of immortalized myeloma cell lines (left), and a screening process to isolate antigen-specific B-cells that produce the desired IgG antibodies (right). In both workflows, Namocell’s Single Cell Dispensers are used to isolate single cells for downstream analysis.
Namocell Benefits

Gentle
- Gentle sorting (<2 psi) preserving cell viability
- Higher clonality
- Better outgrowth
Easy
- Quick setup in under 3 min
- No calibration and no maintenance
Fast
- Quickly isolate rare antigen-specific B cells
- Process up to 1M cells in 5 min
Sterile
- Compact size fitting in tissue culture hood
- Sterile and disposable cell cartridge
Dispensing Efficiency
Namocell Single Cell Dispensers are highly efficient and consistent at dispensing single cells. With dispensing efficiency (percentage of dispensed wells with single cells) of 80-90% for CHO cells compared to ~30% using manual pipetting.

Single B Cell Isolation

Namocell’s Single Cell Dispenser was used to isolate single memory B cells for cDNA library construction. Expression of immunoglobulin genes via qPCR confirmed the uniform presence of heavy chain IGVH and the presence of either the kappa or lambda light chains (IGVK, IGVL) in eight representative single cells.
Application Notes
B Cell Isolation for Single Cell Genomics
Single Cell Dispensing Efficiency