Abstract
Antibodies are a group of proteins responsible for mediating immune reactions in vertebrates. They are able to bind a variety of structural motifs on noxious molecules tagging them for elimination from the organism. As a result of their versatile binding properties, antibodies are currently one of the most important classes of biopharmaceuticals. In this chapter, we discuss how knowledge-based computational methods can aid experimentalists in the development of potent antibodies. When using common experimental methods for antibody development, we often know the sequence of an antibody that binds to our molecule, antigen, of interest. We may also have a structure or model of the antigen. In these cases, computational methods can help by both modeling the antibody and identifying the antibody–antigen contact residues. This information can then play a key role in the rational design of more potent antibodies.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Robinson WH (2014) Sequencing the functional antibody repertoire-diagnostic and therapeutic discovery. Nat Rev Rheumatol 11:171–182. doi:10.1038/nrrheum.2014.220
Silverton EW, Navia MA, Davies DR (1977) Three-dimensional structure of an intact human immunoglobulin. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 74:5140–5144
Murad JP, Lin OA, Espinosa EV, Khasawneh FT (2012) Current and experimental antibody-based therapeutics: insights, breakthroughs, setbacks and future directions. Curr Mol Med 13:165–178
Reichert JM (2014) Antibodies to watch in 2014: mid-year update. MAbs 6:799–802. doi:10.4161/mabs.29282
Reichert JM (2013) Which are the antibodies to watch in 2013? MAbs 5:1–4. doi:10.4161/mabs.22976
Reichert JM (2010) Antibodies to watch in 2010. MAbs 2:84–100, doi: 10677 [pii]
Kuroda D, Shirai H, Jacobson MP, Nakamura H (2012) Computer-aided antibody design. Protein Eng Des Sel 25:507–521. doi:10.1093/protein/gzs024
Lapidoth GD, Baran D, Pszolla GM et al (2015) AbDesign: an algorithm for combinatorial backbone design guided by natural conformations and sequences. Proteins 83:1385–1406
Pantazes RJ, Maranas CD (2010) OptCDR: a general computational method for the design of antibody complementarity determining regions for targeted epitope binding. Protein Eng Des Sel 11:849–858
Lippow SM, Wittrup KD, Tidor B (2007) Computational design of antibody-affinity improvement beyond in vivo maturation. Nat Biotechnol 25:1171–1176
Kim SJ, Park Y, Hong HJ (2005) Antibody engineering for the development of therapeutic antibodies. Mol Cells 20:17–29
Martin ACR (2010) Protein sequence and structure analysis of antibody variable domains. In: Antibody engineering, vol 2. Springer, Berlin, pp 33–51
Safdari Y, Farajnia S, Asgharzadeh M, Khalili M (2013) Antibody humanization methods–a review and update. Biotechnol Genet Eng Rev 29:175–186. doi:10.1080/02648725.2013.801235
Carmen S, Jermutus L (2002) Concepts in antibody phage display. Brief Funct Genomic Proteomic 1:189–203. doi:10.1093/bfgp/1.2.189
Kretzschmar T, Von Rüden T (2002) Antibody discovery: phage display. Curr Opin Biotechnol 13:598–602. doi:10.1016/S0958-1669(02)00380-4
Dunbar J, Krawczyk K, Leem J et al (2013) SAbDab: the structural antibody database. Nucleic Acids Res 42(Database issue):D1140–D1146
Almagro JC, Teplyakov A, Luo J et al (2014) Second antibody modeling assessment (AMA-II). Proteins 82:1553–1562. doi:10.1002/prot.24567
Wu TT, Kabat EA (1970) An analysis of the sequences of the variable regions of Bence Jones proteins and myeloma light chains and their implications for antibody complementarity. J Exp Med 132:211–250
Al-Lazikani B, Lesk AM, Chothia C (1997) Standard conformations for the canonical structures of immunoglobulins. J Mol Biol 273:927–948. doi:10.1006/jmbi.1997.1354
Abhinandan KR, Martin ACR (2008) Analysis and improvements to Kabat and structurally correct numbering of antibody variable domains. Mol Immunol 45:3832–3839
Lefranc MP (2011) IMGT unique numbering for the variable (V), constant (C), and groove (G) domains of IG, TR, MH, IgSF, and MhSF. Cold Spring Harb Protoc 6:633–642
Honegger A, Plückthun A (2001) Yet another numbering scheme for immunoglobulin variable domains: an automatic modeling and analysis tool. J Mol Biol 309:657–670. doi:10.1006/jmbi.2001.4662
Ehrenmann F, Kaas Q, Lefranc M (2010) IMGT/3Dstructure-DB and IMGT/DomainGapAlign: a database and a tool for immunoglobulins or antibodies, T cell receptors, MHC, IgSF and MhcSF. Nucleic Acids Res 38:D301–D307
Adolf-Bryfogle J, Xu Q, North B et al (2015) PyIgClassify: a database of antibody CDR structural classifications. Nucleic Acids Res 43:D432–D438
MacCallum RM, Martin AC, Thornton JM (1996) Antibody-antigen interactions: contact analysis and binding site topography. J Mol Biol 262:732–745. doi:10.1006/jmbi.1996.0548
Lefranc M, Pommié C, Ruiz M et al (2003) IMGT unique numbering for immunoglobulin and T cell receptor variable domains and Ig superfamily V-like domains. Dev Comp Immunol 27:55–77
North B, Lehmann A, Dunbrack RL Jr (2011) A new clustering of antibody CDR loop conformations. J Mol Biol 2:228–256
Berman HM, Westbrook J, Feng Z et al (2000) The protein data bank. Nucleic Acids Res 28:235–242
Chothia C, Lesk AM (1987) Canonical structures for the hypervariable regions of immunoglobulins. J Mol Biol 4:901–917
Chothia C, Lesk AM, Tramontano A et al (1989) Conformations of immunoglobulin hypervariable regions. Nature 342:877–883
Tramontano A, Chothia C, Lesk AM (1989) Structural determinants of the conformations of medium-sized loops in proteins. Proteins 6:382–394
Martin ACR (1996) Accessing the Kabat antibody sequence database by computer. Proteins 25:130–133
Oliva B, Bates PA, Querol E et al (1998) Automated classification of antibody complementarity determining region 3 of the heavy chain (H3) loops into canonical forms and its application to protein structure prediction. J Mol Biol 279:1193–1210
Nikoloudis D, Pitts JE, Street M, Ridgeway T (2014) A complete, multi-level conformational clustering of antibody complementarity-determining regions. PeerJ 2:e456
Choi Y, Deane CM (2010) FREAD revisited: accurate loop structure prediction using a database search algorithm. Proteins 78:1431–1440. doi:10.1002/prot.22658
Choi Y, Deane CM (2011) Predicting antibody complementarity determining region structures without classification. Mol Biosyst 7:3327–3334
Morea V, Tramontano A, Rustici M et al (1998) Conformations of the third hypervariable region in the VH domain of immunoglobulins. J Mol Biol 275:269–294
Kuroda D, Shirai H, Kobori M, Nakamura H (2008) Structural classification of CDR-H3 revisited: a lesson in antibody modeling. Proteins 73:608–620. doi:10.1002/prot.22087
Marcatili P, Rosi A, Tramontano A (2008) PIGS: automatic prediction of antibody structures. Bioinformatics 24:1953–1954
Shirai H, Ikeda K, Yamashita K et al (2014) High-resolution modeling of antibody structures by a combination of bioinformatics, expert knowledge, and molecular simulations. Proteins 82:1624–1635
Riechmann L, Clark M, Waldmann H et al (1988) Resha** human antibodies for therapy. Nature 332:323–327
Foote J, Winter G (1992) Antibody framework residues affecting the conformation of the hypervariable loops. J Mol Biol 224:487–499
Chatellier J, Van Regenmortel MH, Vernet T, Altschuh D (1996) Functional map** of conserved residues located at the VL and VH domain interface of a Fab. J Mol Biol 264:1–6. doi:10.1006/jmbi.1996.0618
Banfield MJ, King DJ, Mountain A, Brady RL (1997) VL:VH domain rotations in engineered antibodies: crystal structures of the Fab fragments from two murine antitumor antibodies and their engineered human constructs. Proteins 29:161–171
Khalifa MB, Weidenhaupt M, Choulier L et al (2000) Effects on interaction kinetics of mutations at the VH-VL interface of Fabs depend on the structural context. J Mol Recognit 13:127–139. doi:10.1002/1099-1352(200005/06)13:3<127::AID-JMR495>3.0.CO;2-9
Nakanishi T, Tsumoto K, Yokota A et al (2008) Critical contribution of VH–VL interaction to resha** of an antibody: the case of humanization of anti-lysozyme antibody, HyHEL-10. Protein Sci 17:261–270. doi:10.1110/ps.073156708.Protein
Fera D, Schmidt AG, Haynes BF et al (2014) Affinity maturation in an HIV broadly neutralizing B-cell lineage through reorientation of variable domains. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 111:10275–10280. doi:10.1073/pnas.1409954111
Whitelegg NR, Rees AR (2000) WAM: an improved algorithm for modelling antibodies on the WEB. Protein Eng 12:819–824
Ye J, Ma N, Madden TL, Ostell JM (2013) IgBLAST: an immunoglobulin variable domain sequence analysis tool. Nucleic Acids Res 41:W34–W40. doi:10.1093/nar/gkt382
Narayanan A, Sellers BD, Jacobson MP (2009) Energy-based analysis and prediction of the orientation between light-chain and heavy-chain antibody variable domains. J Mol Biol 388:941–953. doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2009.03.043
Sivasubramanian A, Sircar A, Chaudhury S, Gray JJ (2009) Toward high-resolution homology modeling of antibody Fv regions and application to antibody-antigen docking. Proteins 74:497–514
Dunbar J, Fuchs A, Shi J, Deane CM (2013) ABangle: characterising the VH-VL orientation in antibodies. Protein Eng Des Sel 26:611–620
Abhinandan KR, Martin ACR (2010) Analysis and prediction of VH/VL packing in antibodies. Protein Eng Des Sel 23:689–697
Bujotzek A, Dunbar J, Lipsmeier F et al (2015) Prediction of VH-VL domain orientation for antibody variable domain modeling. Proteins 83:681–695
Krawczyk K, Baker T, Shi J, Deane CM (2013) Antibody i-Patch prediction of the antibody binding site improves rigid local antibody-antigen docking. Protein Eng Des Sel 26:621–629. doi:10.1093/protein/gzt043
Kunik V, Peters B, Ofran Y (2012) Structural consensus among antibodies defines the antigen binding site. PLoS Comput Biol 8:e100238. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002388
Kunik V, Ashkenazi S, Ofran Y (2012) Paratome: an online tool for systematic identification of antigen-binding regions in antibodies based on sequence or structure. Nucleic Acids Res 40:W521–W524. doi:10.1093/nar/gks480
Olimpieri PP, Chailyan A, Tramontano A, Marcatili P (2013) Prediction of site-specific interactions in antibody-antigen complexes: the proABC method and server. Bioinformatics 29:2285–2291. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btt369
Kringelum JV, Lundegaard C, Lund O, Nielsen M (2012) Reliable B cell epitope predictions: impacts of method development and improved benchmarking. PLoS Comput Biol 8:e1002829
Ponomarenko JV, Bourne PE (2007) Antibody-protein interactions: benchmark datasets and prediction tools evaluation. BMC Struct Biol 7:64
Shirai H, Prades C, Vita R et al (2014) Antibody informatics for drug discovery. Biochim Biophys Acta 1844:2002–2015. doi:10.1016/j.bbapap.2014.07.006
Huang J, Honda W (2006) CED: a conformational epitope database. BMC Immunol 7:7
Kim Y, Ponomarenko J, Zhu Z et al (2012) Immune epitope database analysis resource. Nucleic Acids Res 40:W525–W530. doi:10.1093/nar/gks438
Kunik V, Ofran Y (2013) The indistinguishability of epitopes from protein surface is explained by the distinct binding preferences of each of the six antigen-binding loops. Protein Eng Des Sel 26:599–609
Sela-Culang I, Benhnia MREI, Matho MH et al (2014) Using a combined computational-experimental approach to predict antibody-specific B cell epitopes. Structure 22:646–657. doi:10.1016/j.str.2014.02.003
Krawczyk K, Liu X, Baker T et al (2014) Improving B-cell epitope prediction and its application to global antibody-antigen docking. Bioinformatics 30:2288–2294. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu190
Brenke R, Hall DR, Chuang GY et al (2012) Application of asymmetric statistical potentials to antibody-protein docking. Bioinformatics 28:2608–2614. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bts493
Chen R, Li L, Weng Z (2003) ZDOCK: an initial-stage protein docking algorithm. Proteins 1:80–87
Sircar A, Gray JJ (2010) SnugDock: paratope structural optimization during antibody-antigen docking compensates for errors in antibody homology models. PLoS Comput Biol 6:e1000644. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000644
Sircar A, Kim ET, Gray JJ (2009) RosettaAntibody: antibody variable region homology modeling server. Nucleic Acids Res 37:W474–W479. doi:10.1093/nar/gkp387
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Krawczyk, K., Dunbar, J., Deane, C.M. (2017). Computational Tools for Aiding Rational Antibody Design. In: Samish, I. (eds) Computational Protein Design. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1529. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6637-0_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6637-0_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-6635-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-6637-0
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols