Last year, the Structural Antibody Database (SAbDab) listed a record-breaking 894 new antibody structures, driven in no small part by the continued efforts of the researchers to understand SARS-CoV-2.
In this blog post I wanted to highlight the major driving force behind this curve – the huge increase in cryo electron microscopy (cryoEM) data – and the implications of this for the field of structure-based antibody informatics.
Continue readingSometimes it can be advantageous to combine two proteins into one. One such technique was described by Jennifer Padilla, Christos Colovos, and Todd Yeates back in 2001 (Padilla, et al., 2001). By connecting two proteins, one that dimerized, and another that trimerized, they were able to design synthetic ‘nanohedra’. The way they achieved this was by extending a C-terminal α-helix at the end of one protein by another α-helix ‘linker’, directly into the N-terminal α-helix of another protein: