Direct Replacement of Secondary Antibodies By Affimer Proteins

Animal products are important reagents used in many research settings but little research is being performed to help reduce the number of these reagents in general laboratories. Antibodies are prime examples of such reagents. Polyclonal anti-immunoglobulin G (anti-IgG) secondary antibodies are essential tools in boosting the sensitivity of primary antibodies in a wide range of applications in research and diagnostics. They are established reagents in any molecular biology laboratory around the world. Despite some progress in developing alternative formats of antibodies (recombinant antibodies) their generation relies mainly on animal immunization, bleeding and sacrifice. The ultimate aim of this exciting PhD proposal is the replacement of animal-produced secondary antibodies by novel artificial binding proteins, termed Affimers. Affimer proteins out perform antibodies with a) short development times (10 days), b) robustness including high stability, c) no batch-to-batch variations and d) high expression levels in bacterial expression system. Our group has generated large Affimer phage libraries and screened more than 600 target proteins, peptides and small compounds successfully.
Affimers are now established as versatile and renewable reagents and have been used in numerous high-impact publications such as eLife, PNAS, Molecular Cell, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Science Signalling, EMBO and Blood.