DNA Origami Used to Measure Top Effectiveness of Antibodies

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet and the University of Oslo in Norway used DNA origami to demonstrate the most accurate distance between densely packed antigens in order to get the strongest bond to antibodies in the immune system. The study (“Binding to nanopatterned antigens is dominated by the spatial tolerance of antibodies”), which was published in Nature Nanotechnology, may be of significance to the development of vaccines and immunotherapy used in cancer, according to the scientists.
“Although repetitive patterns of antigens are crucial for certain immune responses, an understanding of how antibodies bind and dynamically interact with various spatial arrangements of molecules is lacking. Hence, we introduced a new method in which molecularly precise nanoscale patterns of antigens are displayed using DNA origami and immobilized in a surface plasmon resonance set-up. Using antibodies with identical antigen-binding domains, we found that all the subclasses and isotypes studied bind bivalently to two antigens separated at distances that range from 3 to 17 nm,” wrote the investigators.