The emerging formats of antibody fragments for biotherapeutics suffer from inadequate purification methods, delaying the advances of innovative therapies. One of the top therapeutic candidates, the single -chain variable fragment (scFv), requires the development of individual purification protocols dependent on the type of scFv. The available approaches that are based on selective affinity chromatography but do not involve the use of a purification tag, such as Protein L and Protein A chromatography, require acidic elution buffers. These elution conditions can cause the formation of aggregates and thereby greatly com-promise the yield, which can be a major problem for scFvs that are generally unstable molecules. Due to the costly and time-consuming production of biological drugs, like antibody fragments, we have en-gineered novel purification ligands that elute the scFvs in a calcium-dependent manner. The developed ligands are equipped with new, selective binding surfaces and were shown to efficiently elute all cap-tured scFv at neutral pH with the use of a calcium chelator. Further, two of three ligands were proven not to bind to the CDRs of the scFv, indicating potential for use as generic affinity ligands to a range of different scFvs. Multimerization and optimization of the most promising ligand led to a 3-fold increase in binding capacity for the hexamer compared to the monomer, in addition to highly selective and efficient purification of a scFv with > 95% purity in a single purification step. This calcium-dependent ligand could revolutionize the scFv industry, greatly facilitating the purification procedure and improving the quality of the final product.

Protein activity regulated by interactions with metal ions can be utilized for many different purposes, including biological therapies and bioprocessing, among others. Calcium ions are known to interact with the frequently occurring EF-hand motif, which can alter protein activity upon binding through an induced conformational change. The calcium-binding loop of the EF-hand motif has previously been introduced into a small protein domain derived from staphylococcal Protein A in a successful effort to render antibody binding dependent on calcium. Presented here, is a combinatorial library for calcium-regulated affinity, CaRA, based on this domain. CaRA is the first alternative scaffold library designed to achieve novel target specificities with metal-dependent binding. From this library, several calcium-dependent binders could be isolated through phage display campaigns towards a set of unrelated target proteins (IgE Cε3-Cε4, TNFα, IL23, scFv, tPA, PCSK9 and HER3) useful for distinct applications. Overall, these monomeric CaRA variants showed high stability and target affinities within the nanomolar range. They displayed considerably higher melting temperatures in the presence of 1 mM calcium compared to without calcium. Further, all discovered binders proved to be calcium-dependent, with the great majority showing complete lack of target binding in the absence of calcium. As demonstrated, the CaRA library is highly capable of providing protein-binding domains with calcium-dependent behavior, independent of the type of target protein. These binding domains could subsequently be of great use in gentle protein purification or as novel therapeutic modalities.

Visualization of membrane domains like lipid rafts in natural or artificial membranes is a crucial task for cell biology. For this purpose, fluorescence microscopy is often used. Since fluorescing probes in lipid membranes partition specifically in e.g. local liquid disordered or liquid ordered environments, the consequent changes in their orientation and location are both theoretically and experimentally of interest. Here we focused on a liquid disordered membrane phase and performed molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the indocarbocyanine DiD probes by varying the length of the attached alkyl tails and also the length of the cyanine backbone. From the probed compounds in a DOPC lipid bilayer at ambient temperature, a varying orientation of the transition dipole moment was observed, which is crucial for fluorescence microscopy and which, through photoselection, was found to be surprisingly more effective for asymmetric probes than for the symmetric ones. Furthermore, we observed that the orientation of the probes was dependent on the tail length; with the methyls or propyls attached, DiD oriented with its tails facing the water, contrary to the ones with longer tails. With advanced hybrid QM/MM calculations we show that the different local environment for differently oriented probes affected the one-photon absorption spectra, that was blue-shifted for the short-tailed DiD with respect to the DiDs with longer tails. We show here that the presented probes can be successfully used for fluorescence microscopy and we believe that the described properties bring further insight for the experimental use of these probes.

The photoinduced controlled radical polymerisation (CRP) technique has been utilised to graft methyl acrylate (MA) and di(ethylene glycol) ethyl ether acrylate (DEGA) from filter paper. Grafting of MA was performed from alpha-bromoisobutyryl bromide functionalised papers. The amount of polymer grafted on the surface could be regulated by modifying the target DP of the reaction. SEC of cleaved linear polymer grafts showed that the grafting from filter papers proceeded with different kinetics compared to polymerisation from a free initiator added to the reaction mixture, resulting in higher dispersity. Furthermore, filter papers were polymerised with a-chloro-epsilon-caprolactone by surface-initiated ring opening polymerisation, yielding linear grafts containing initiating functions through-out the main chain. This functionality was subsequently utilised for the photoinduced CRP grafting of DEGA, yielding a graft-on-graft structure, which resulted in a thermoresponsive cellulose surface.