Display of somatostatin-related peptides in the complementarity determining regions of an antibody light chain

Abstract

Peptide display in antibody complementarity determining regions (CDRs) offers several advantages over other peptide display systems including the potential to graft heterologous peptide sequences into multiple positions in the same backbone molecule. Despite the presence of six CDRs in an antibody variable domain, the majority of insertions reported have been made in heavy chain CDR3 (h-CDR3) which may be explained in part by the highly variable length and sequence diversity found in h-CDR3 in native antibodies. The ability to graft peptide sequences into CDRs is restricted by amino acids in these loops that make structural contacts to framework regions or are oriented towards the hydrophobic interior and are important for the proper folding of the antibody. To identify such positions in human κ-light chain CDR1 (κ-CDR1) and CDR2 (κ-CDR2), we performed alignments of 1330 κ-light chain variable region amino acid sequences and 19 variable region X-ray crystal structures. From analyses of these alignments, we predict insertion points where sequences can be grafted into κ-CDR1 and κ-CDR2 to prepare synthetic antibody molecules. We then tested these predictions by inserting somatostatin and somatostatin-related sequences into κ-CDR1 and κ-CDR2, and analyzing the expression and ability of the modified antibodies to bind to membranes containing somatostatin receptor 5. These results expand the repertoire of CDRs that can be used for the display of heterologous peptides in the CDRs of antibodies.