PEDS Advance Access originally published online on January 10, 2009
Protein Engineering Design and Selection 2009 22(3):121-134; doi:10.1093/protein/gzn077
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This article appears in the following Protein Engineering issue: Antibody Special Issue [View the issue table of contents]
The influence of the framework core residues on the biophysical properties of immunoglobulin heavy chain variable domains
Biochemisches Institut der Universität Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland
3 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: plueckthun{at}bioc.uzh.ch
Antibody variable domains differ considerably in stability. Single-chain Fv (scFv) fragments derived from natural repertoires frequently lack the high stability needed for therapeutic application, necessitating reengineering not only to humanize their sequence, but also to improve their biophysical properties. The human VH3 domain has been identified as having the best biophysical properties among human subtypes. However, complementarity determining region (CDR) grafts from highly divergent VH domains to huVH3 frequently fail to reach its superior stability. In previous experiments involving a CDR graft from a murine VH9 domain of very poor stability to huVH3, a hybrid VH framework was obtained which combines the lower core residues of muVH9 with the surface residues of huVH3. It resulted in a scFv with far better biophysical properties than the corresponding grafts to the consensus huVH3 framework. To better understand the origin of the superior properties of the hybrid framework, we constructed further hybrids, but now in the context of the consensus CDR-H1 and -H2 of the original human VH3 domain. The new hybrids included elements from either murine VH9, human VH1 or human VH5 domains. From guanidinium chloride-induced equilibrium denaturation measurements, kinetic denaturation experiments, measurements of heat-induced aggregation and comparison of soluble expression yield in Escherichia coli, we conclude that the optimal VH framework is CDR-dependent. The present work pinpoints structural features responsible for this dependency and helps to explain why the immune system uses more than one framework with different structural subtypes in framework 1 to optimally support widely different CDRs.
Keywords: antibody engineering/framework 1 structure/immunoglobulin variable domains/scFv fragment/stability
Received October 3, 2008; revised November 26, 2008; accepted November 27, 2008.
1 Present address: University of British Columbia, Faculty of Medicine, Class of 2011, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3, Canada.
2 Present address: Department of Biochemistry, University of Washington, HSB J555, Box 357350, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
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