Functional and epitope specific monoclonal antibody discovery directly from immune sera using cryo-EM

Antibodies are crucial therapeutics, comprising a substantial portion of approved drugs due to their safety and clinical efficacy. Traditional antibody discovery methods are labor-intensive, limiting scalability and high-throughput analysis. Here, we improved upon our streamlined approach combining structural analysis and bioinformatics to infer heavy and light chain sequences from cryo-EM (cryo–electron microscopy) maps of serum-derived polyclonal antibodies (pAbs) bound to antigens. Using ModelAngelo, an automated structure-building tool, we accelerated pAb sequence determination and identified sequence matches in B cell repertoires via ModelAngelo-derived hidden Markov models (HMMs) associated with pAb structures. Benchmarking against results from a nonhuman primate HIV vaccine trial, our pipeline reduced analysis time from weeks to under a day with higher precision. Validation with murine immune sera from influenza vaccination revealed multiple protective antibodies. This workflow enhances antibody discovery, enabling faster, more accurate mapping of polyclonal responses with broad applications in vaccine development and therapeutic antibody discovery.