Custom Antibody Production Services from Aves Labs, Inc.

This standard protocol typically takes 11 weeks (from the day we receive your antigen to the day you receive the purified antibody in the mail), and yields about 500 mg immune IgY and about 150 mg pre-immune IgY. The preparations we send you are filter-sterilized, and is least 90% pure IgY. Unless otherwise requested, your antibodies are in phosphate buffered isotonic saline (PBS) containing 0.02% sodium azide.

We also routinely collect an additional 12 eggs after the 6 eggs used to prepare immune antibodies, and store these eggs for a period of 2 months, in case you want us to purify additional batches of antibodies. Since egg yolk antibody titres fall relatively slowly (as compared, for example, to rabbit serum levels), the titres in the second batch of 6 eggs are likely to be the same as those in the purified immune batch.

In addition, we maintain the injected hens for 3 weeks following mailing of antibodies. If you decide to have us perform additional injections, we ask you to notify us within this 3 week period.

Large Scale (kilogram quantites of Igy)
We can produce kilogram quantities of IgY (or tens of gram quantities of affinity purified antibodies) to meet your specifications and your timetable. These antibodies can be made against recombinant proteins, synthetic peptides, haptens, etc. A typical large-scale project would involve:

• Prescreening hens with ELISAs to eliminate those that might contribute to high backgrounds.
• Injecting hens every 3 weeks to produce hyperimmunized animals
• Purifying the IgY fractions from eggs collected from these hens and affinity purifying the antibodies against immunosorbent materials.
• Labeling the affinity purified antibodies with biotin, HRP, fluorescent dyes, or conjugating these antibodies to agarose.
• Performing ELISAs and other tests to assure that the quantities, affinities, and other properties of the antibodies surpass quality control specifications.