Molecular design of recombinant scFv antibodies for site-specific photocoupling to ß-cyclodextrin in solution and onto solid support.

The ability to design and tailor-make antibodies to meet the biophysical demands required by the vast range of current and future antibody-based applications within biotechnology and biomedicine will be essential. In this proof-of-concept study, we have for the first time tailored human recombinant scFv antibodies for site-specific photocoupling through the use of an unnatural amino acid (UAA) and the dock'n'flash technology. In more detail, we have successfully explored the possibility to expand the genetic code of E. coli and introduced the photoreactive UAA p-benzoyl-L-phenylalanine (pBpa), and showed that the mutated scFv antibody could be expressed in E. coli with retained structural and functional properties, as well as binding affinity. The pBpa group was then used for affinity capture of the mutated antibody by ß-cyclodextrin (ß-CD), which provided the hydrogen atoms to be abstracted in the subsequent photocoupling process upon irradiation at 365nm. The results showed that the pBpa mutated antibody could be site-specifically photocoupled to free and surface (array) immobilized ß-CD. Taken together, this paves the way for novel means of tailoring recombinant scFv antibodies for site-specific photochemical-based tagging, functionalization and immobilization in numerous applications.

Quantitative interpretation of gold nanoparticle-based bioassays designed for detection of immunocomplex formation.

The authors present in this paper how the extended Mie theory can be used to translate not only end-point data but also temporal variations of extinction peak-position changes, Deltalambda(peak)(t), into absolute mass uptake, Gamma(t), upon biomacromolecule binding to localized surface plasmon resonance (SPR) active nanoparticles (NPs). The theoretical analysis is applied on a novel sensor template composed of a three-layer surface architecture based on (i) a self-assembled monolayer of HS(CH(2))(15)COOH, (ii) a 1:1 mixture of biotinylated and pure poly(L-lysine)-graft-poly(ethylene glycol) (PLL-g-PEG), and (iii) NeutrAvidin. Assisted by independent estimations of the thickness of the three-layer architecture using quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D) monitoring, excellent agreement with parallel mass-uptake estimations using planar SPR is obtained. Furthermore, unspecific binding of serum to PLL-g-PEG was shown to be below the detection limit, making the surface architecture ideally suited for label-free detection of immunoreactions. To ensure that the immunocomplex formation occurred within the limited sensing depth (approximately 10 nm) of the NPs, a compact model system composed of a biotinylated human recombinant single-chain antibody fragment (slashed circle approximately 2 nm) directed against cholera toxin was selected. By tracking changes in the centroid (center of mass) of the extinction peak, rather than the actual peak position, signal-to-noise levels and long-term stability upon cholera toxin detection are demonstrated to be competitive with results obtained using conventional SPR and state-of-the-art QCM-D data.