PIXABAY, ULLEOCamelids such as camels, llamas, and alpacas make an unusual class of antibodies with a growing number of applications in biomedical science. But researchers wanting to use those antibodies currently have to go through a lengthy and expensive procedure to extract them, limiting the molecules’ use in the lab. Now, a team of US researchers have devised a way to produce the same antibodies in yeast instead, allowing the molecules to be made and identified quickly and cheaply. The findings were published Monday (February 12) in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.
“There’s a real need for something like this,” study coauthor Andrew Kruse, a biophysicist at Harvard Medical School, says in a statement. “It’s low-tech, it’s a low time investment and it has a high likelihood of success for most proteins. . . . People who have struggled to nail down their protein structures for years with llamas are getting them now.”
In addition to conventional mammalian antibodies, which contain two heavy and two light molecular chains, camelids produce a second set of antibodies made up only of heavy chains. The binding sites of these molecules are known as nanobodies, and, thanks to their smaller size, can bind to otherwise inaccessible parts of proteins. Researchers use the molecules to stabilize a number of peptides of biomedical ...
