PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Rhys M. Adams
AU  - Justin B. Kinney
AU  - Thierry Mora
AU  - Aleksandra M. Walczak
TI  - Measuring the sequence-affinity landscape of antibodies with massively parallel titration curves
AID  - 10.1101/036335
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 036335
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/10/036335.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/10/036335.full
AB  - Despite the central role that antibodies play in the adaptive immune system and in biotechnology, much remains unknown about the quantitative relationship between an antibody’s amino acid sequence and its antigen binding affinity. Here we describe a new experimental approach, called Tite-Seq, that is capable of measuring binding titration curves and corresponding affinities for thousands of variant antibodies in parallel. The measurement of titration curves eliminates the confounding effects of antibody expression and stability inherent to standard deep mutational scanning assays. We demonstrate Tite-Seq on the CDR1H and CDR3H regions of a well-studied scFv antibody. Our data sheds light on the structural basis for antigen binding affinity, and suggests a dominant role for CDR1H in establishing antibody stability. Tite-Seq fills a large gap in the ability to measure critical aspects of the adaptive immune system, and can be readily used for studying sequence-affinity landscapes in other protein systems.