Nanobody

Mission

The Nanobody facility provides a service for the selection and production of nanobodies from either phage display or yeast surface display libraries or from immunising alpaca for the generation of high-affinity nanobodies.

Technology

Nanobodies are also known as single domain antibodies (sdAbs) and they are small antibody fragments (15kDa) derived from heavy chain antibodies of animals from the Camelidae family such as alpacas. Nanobodies can be selected from synthetic libraries, Naïve or custom-built immune libraries. Characterisation of nanobodies for specificity, production yield and affinity are important.

Applications

Nanobodies have been used to identify novel protein conformations and to stabilize crystal structures. They have also found applications as therapeutics and diagnostics and have been use as intrabodies for probing intracellular structures.

The facility is overseen by Chris Tate, Manu Hegde and Radu Aricescu and run by Mary Angani.