Nilvebrant Johan, Rockberg Johan
KTH School of Engineering Sciences in Chemistry, Biotechnology and Health, Protein Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden.
Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Methods Mol Biol. 2018;1785:1-10. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-7841-0_1.
Antibodies are protein molecules used routinely for therapeutic, diagnostic, and research purposes due to their exquisite ability to selectively recognize and bind a given antigen. The particular area of the antigen recognized by the antibody is called the epitope, and for proteinaceous antigens the epitope can be of complex nature. Information about the binding epitope of an antibody can provide important mechanistic insights and indicate for what applications an antibody might be useful. Therefore, a variety of epitope mapping techniques have been developed to localize such regions. Although the real picture is even more complex, epitopes in protein antigens are broadly grouped into linear or discontinuous epitopes depending on the positioning of the epitope residues in the antigen sequence and the requirement of structure. Specialized methods for mapping of the two different classes of epitopes, using high-throughput or high-resolution methods, have been developed. While different in their detail, all of the experimental methods rely on assessing the binding of the antibody to the antigen or a set of antigen mimics. Early approaches utilizing sets of truncated proteins, small numbers of synthesized peptides, and structural analyses of antibody-antigen complexes have been significantly refined. Current state-of-the-art methods involve combinations of mutational scanning, protein display, and high-throughput screening in conjunction with bioinformatic analyses of large datasets.
抗体是蛋白质分子,由于其具有选择性识别和结合特定抗原的卓越能力,常被用于治疗、诊断和研究目的。抗体识别的抗原特定区域称为表位,对于蛋白质抗原而言,表位可能具有复杂的性质。有关抗体结合表位的信息可以提供重要的机制见解,并表明该抗体可能适用于哪些应用。因此,已经开发了多种表位作图技术来定位这些区域。尽管实际情况更为复杂,但根据表位残基在抗原序列中的位置和结构要求,蛋白质抗原中的表位大致可分为线性表位或不连续表位。已经开发了使用高通量或高分辨率方法来绘制这两类不同表位的专门方法。尽管细节有所不同,但所有实验方法都依赖于评估抗体与抗原或一组抗原模拟物的结合。利用截短蛋白组、少量合成肽以及抗体 - 抗原复合物的结构分析的早期方法已经得到了显著改进。当前的先进方法包括突变扫描、蛋白质展示和高通量筛选与大型数据集的生物信息学分析相结合。