Engineering Antiviral Agents via Surface Plasmon Resonance

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is used to measure hemagglutinin (HA) binding to domain-swapped Cyanovirin-N (CV-N) dimer and to monitor interactions between mannosylated peptides and CV-N's high-affinity binding site. Virus envelope spikes gp120, HA, and Ebola glycoprotein (GP) 1,2 have been reported to bind both high- and low-affinity binding sites on dimeric CVN2. Dimannosylated HA peptide is also bound at the two low-affinity binding sites to an engineered molecule of CVN2, which is bearing a high-affinity site for the respective ligand and mutated to replace a stabilizing disulfide bond in the carbohydrate-binding pocket, thus confirming multivalent binding. HA binding is shown to one high-affinity binding site of pseudo-antibody CVN2 at a dissociation constant (KD) of 275 nM that further neutralizes human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) through oligomerization. Correlating the number of disulfide bridges in domain-swapped CVN2, which are decreased from 4 to 2 by substituting cystines into polar residue pairs of glutamic acid and arginine, results in reduced binding affinity to HA. Among the strongest interactions, Ebola GP1,2 is bound by CVN2 with two high-affinity binding sites in the lower nanomolar range using the envelope glycan without a transmembrane domain. In the present study, binding of the multispecific monomeric CV-N to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike (S) glycoprotein is measured at KD = 18.6 µM as compared with nanomolar KD to those other virus spikes, and via its receptor-binding domain in the mid-µ-molar range.