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Conformational Entropy as a Potential Liability of Computationally Designed Antibodies.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

Abstract

In silico antibody discovery is emerging as a viable alternative to traditional in vivo and in vitro approaches. Many challenges, however, remain open to enabling the properties of designed antibodies to match those produced by the immune system. A major question concerns the structural features of computer-designed complementarity determining regions (CDRs), including the role of conformational entropy in determining the stability and binding affinity of the designed antibodies. To address this problem, we used enhanced-sampling molecular dynamics simulations to compare the free energy landscapes of single-domain antibodies (sdAbs) designed using structure-based (DesAb-HSA-D3) and sequence-based approaches (DesAbO), with that of a nanobody derived from llama immunization (Nb10). Our results indicate that the CDR3 of DesAbO is more conformationally heterogeneous than those of both DesAb-HSA-D3 and Nb10, and the CDR3 of DesAb-HSA-D3 is slightly more dynamic than that of Nb10, which is the original scaffold used for the design of DesAb-HSA-D3. These differences underline the challenges in the rational design of antibodies by revealing the presence of conformational substates likely to have different binding properties and to generate a high entropic cost upon binding.

Description

Keywords

antibody design, antibody engineering, metadynamics, molecular dynamics, protein design, Antibodies, Complementarity Determining Regions, Entropy, Molecular Conformation, Single-Domain Antibodies

Journal Title

Biomolecules

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2218-273X
2218-273X

Volume Title

12

Publisher

MDPI AG