Synthetic Antibodies Detect Distinct Cellular States of Chromosome Passenger Complex Proteins

High performance affinity reagents are essential tools to enable biologists to profile the cellular location and composition of macromolecular complexes undergoing dynamic reorganization. To support further development of such tools, we have assembled a high-throughput phage display pipeline to generate Fab-based affinity reagents that target different dynamic forms of a large macromolecular complex, using the Chromosomal Passenger Complex (CPC), as an example. The CPC is critical for the maintenance of chromosomal and cytoskeleton processes during cell division. The complex contains 4 protein components: Aurora B kinase, survivin, borealin and INCENP. The CPC acts as a node to dynamically organize other partnering subcomplexes to build multiple functional structures during mitotic progression. Using phage display mutagenesis, a cohort of synthetic antibodies (sABs) were generated against different domains of survivin, borealin and INCENP. Immunofluorescence established that a set of these sABs can discriminate between the form of the CPC complex in the midbody versus the spindle. Others localize to targets, which appear to be less organized, in the nucleus or cytoplasm. This differentiation suggests that different CPC epitopes have dynamic accessibility depending upon the mitotic state of the cell. An Immunoprecipitation/Mass Spectrometry analysis was performed using sABs that bound specifically to the CPC in either the midbody or MT spindle macromolecular assemblies. Thus, sABs can be exploited as high performance reagents to profile the accessibility of different components of the CPC within macromolecular assemblies during different stages of mitosis suggesting this high throughput approach will be applicable to other complex macromolecular systems.