Surface Plasmon Resonance Analysis of PfEMP1 Interaction with Receptors

A detailed understanding of the interaction between the highly variant Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane proteins 1 (PfEMP1) and their human binding partners is essential to explain their roles in disease development in malaria, as well as to understand how antibodies can inhibit these interactions and how the parasite manages to evade such an immune response. This chapter focuses on using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) as a reproducible, high-throughput method to quantitatively characterize these interactions. We describe how to utilize protein A or A/G and streptavidin for protein immobilization on SPR sensor chips and provide instructions on how to biotinylate proteins for this purpose and how to use SPR for binding competition assays. Since these experiments rely on recombinant proteins, we also present a method to verify their structural integrity using circular dichroism spectroscopy.