Single-domain antibody-based ligands for immunoaffinity separation of recombinant human lactoferrin from the goat lactoferrin of transgenic goat milk

• Single-domain antibodies with high specificity to human lactoferrin are generated.
• Generated antibodies are used to efficiently separate human and goat lactoferrins.
• Single-domain antibody-based ligands can help to separate highly homologous proteins.

Single-domain antibody generation technology was applied to make new Sepharose-bound ligands for affinity separation of closely related proteins, such as human and goat lactoferrin. We generated recombinant antibodies that can selectively bind/recognize only lactoferrins having amino acid sequences identical to that of human natural lactoferrin (anti-hLF Ab). Selected and purified histidine-tagged single-domain antibodies were used as ligands, and different lactoferrins were used as analytes in the kinetics analysis of lactoferrin binding to captured anti-hLF Abs using the Bio-Rad ProteOn XPR36 protein interaction array system. The data obtained were consistent with a 1:1 binding model with very high affinity, practically equal in the case of hLF and rec-hLF (calculated KD varied from 0.43 nM to 3.7 nM). Interaction of captured fsdAbs with goat LF was significantly weaker and not detectable under the same analysis conditions. We demonstrated the high efficiency of the recombinant human lactoferrin purification from goat lactoferrin and other proteins using the obtained single domain antibody-based affinity ligands. We believe this approach can be used for the generation of single-domain antibody-based affinity media for the efficient separation/purification of a wide spectrum of other highly homologous proteins.