Exploring cellular biochemistry with nanobodies
Name
1-s2.0-S0021925817503634-main.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.62 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
eba8f28dbdcfbe29be957bafd812174e
Author(s)
Cheloha, Ross W
Harmand, Thibault J
Wijne, Charlotte
Schwartz, Thomas U
Ploegh, Hidde L
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Journal of Biological Chemistry
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 Cheloha et al. Published under exclusive license by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc. Reagents that bind tightly and specifically to biomolecules of interest remain essential in the exploration of biology and in their ultimate application to medicine. Besides ligands for receptors of known specificity, agents commonly used for this purpose are monoclonal antibodies derived from mice, rabbits, and other animals. However, such antibodies can be expensive to produce, challenging to engineer, and are not necessarily stable in the context of the cellular cytoplasm, a reducing environment. Heavy chain-only antibodies, discovered in camelids, have been truncated to yield single-domain antibody fragments (VHHs or nanobodies) that overcome many of these shortcomings. Whereas they are known as crystallization chaperones for membrane proteins or as simple alternatives to conventional antibodies, nanobodies have been applied in settings where the use of standard antibodies or their derivatives would be impractical or impossible. We review recent examples in which the unique properties of nanobodies have been combined with complementary methods, such as chemical functionalization, to provide tools with unique and useful properties.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biology
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1074/JBC.REV120.012960
