Measuring the Sequence-affinity Landscape of Antibodies with Massively Parallel Titration Curves

Overview

Journal Elife

Specialty Biology

Date 2016 Dec 31

PMID 28035901

Citations 69

Authors

Rhys M Adams

Thierry Mora

Aleksandra M Walczak

Justin B Kinney

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Despite the central role that antibodies play in the adaptive immune system and in biotechnology, much remains unknown about the quantitative relationship between an antibody's amino acid sequence and its antigen binding affinity. Here we describe a new experimental approach, called Tite-Seq, that is capable of measuring binding titration curves and corresponding affinities for thousands of variant antibodies in parallel. The measurement of titration curves eliminates the confounding effects of antibody expression and stability that arise in standard deep mutational scanning assays. We demonstrate Tite-Seq on the CDR1H and CDR3H regions of a well-studied scFv antibody. Our data shed light on the structural basis for antigen binding affinity and suggests a role for secondary CDR loops in establishing antibody stability. Tite-Seq fills a large gap in the ability to measure critical aspects of the adaptive immune system, and can be readily used for studying sequence-affinity landscapes in other protein systems.

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