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. This 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.
- Gentle sorting (<2 psi) preserves cell viability
- Higher clonality
- Better outgrowth
- Quickly isolate rare antigen-specific B cells
- Process up to 1M cells in 5 min
- Quick setup in under 3 min
- No calibration and no maintenance
- Compact size fitting in tissue culture hood
- Sterile and disposable cell cartridge
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.
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.
B Cell Isolation for Single Cell Genomics
Single Cell Dispensing Efficiency
We’ve been using the Namo to do single cell sorting for genomics/ transcriptomics applications as well as for colony selection for tissue culture. We’re overall very satisfied with our results and find the setup to be very easy, as well as standard maintenance. After sterility protocols (which can take an hour), being able to immediately jump to sorting in less than ten minutes has saved us time and precious samples.
Noelani Kamelamela
Here at Cytovance, we love our Namocell. This machine has increased our plating capacity and efficiency nearly four-fold. The accuracy of Namocell’s 384-well plating coupled with the easy changes between samples has been a game changer for our workflow.
Mike Brem
Namocell Hana single cell dispenser provides a great solution for gentle single cell cloning using sterile disposable cartridges. The system is easy to use and quick to initialize. Hana combines the advantages of FACS and microfluidic cell dispensing to enable high assurance of monoclonality with high throughput and great cell viability.
Mandy Yim
Namocell’s disposable cartridges have allowed us to increase the throughput of the validation of our CRISPR engineered cell lines since we can sort a full plate in less than 3 minutes, and can move to the next plate without the hassle of cleaning. This outstanding product is paired with Namocell’s exceptional customer service that has been responsive and attentive to our needs. While evaluating different FACS machines, we simply did not find a rival that combined Namocell’s simplicity, performance and value, all while occupying a small footprint.
Trang Dickson
Our stem cell core facility was looking for ways to speed up our human induced pluripotent cell cloning to generate clonal cell lines and to analyze our gene editing efficiencies in single cells. Our criteria for an instrument for single cell dispensing was 1) sterility, 2) gentle on cells, 3) ease of use, and 4) reasonable cost. The Namocell fitted our criteria perfectly. We are able to reduce the time and effort for generating clonal CRISPR-engineered iPSC lines significantly. The instrument requires very little maintenance and users do not need to be highly trained with the main requirement being good aseptic technique. We are excited to use the Namocell potentially for other single cell applications.
Po-Lin So
