Biological Applications of Synthetic Binders Isolated from a Conceptually New Adhiron Library

Adhirons are small (10 kDa) synthetic ligands that might represent an alternative to antibody fragments and to alternative scaffolds such as DARPins or affibodies.

We prepared a conceptionally new adhiron phage display library that allows the presence of cysteines in the hypervariable loops and successfully panned it against antigens possessing different characteristics.

We recovered binders specific for membrane epitopes of plant cells by panning the library directly against pea protoplasts and against soluble C-Reactive Protein and SpyCatcher, a small protein domain for which we failed to isolate binders using pre-immune nanobody libraries. The best binders had a binding constant in the low nM range, were produced easily in bacteria (average yields of 15 mg/L of culture) in combination with different tags, were stable, and had minimal aggregation propensity, independent of the presence or absence of cysteine residues in their loops.

The isolated adhirons were significantly stronger than those isolated previously from other libraries and as good as nanobodies recovered from a naïve library of comparable theoretical diversity. Moreover, they proved to be suitable reagents for ELISA, flow cytometry, the western blot, and also as capture elements in electrochemical biosensors.