Rational Design of Conformation-Specific Antibodies for Tau Oligomers

Antibodies are powerful tools for biological research and clinical applications owing to their ability to bind targets with high affinity and specificity. To exploit them against neurodegeneration, we are developing antibodies to target most toxic early stage aggregates of the protein tau, whose deposition in the brain is linked with Alzheimer's disease and other tauopathies. We generated a panel of single-domain antibodies targeting selected epitopes within tau, using the ‘cascade method’. Briefly, we designed complementary peptides targeting linear epitopes within the sequence of tau using a library of beta-sheet fragments from the protein data bank. We then grafted each peptide into the CDR3 loop of a VH human scaffold. Using this approach, we produced a library of fourteen antibodies covering systematically the length of tau. We will use these antibodies to understand which epitopes are specifically exposed in toxic tau aggregates. In particular, we will employ them in super-resolved imaging, such as DNA points accumulation for imaging in nanoscale topography (DNA PAINT), of protein aggregates. DNA PAINT enables visualization of structures with resolutions below the diffraction limit using short dye-labelled oligonucleotide probes. Transient binding of a dye-labelled ‘imager strand’ to a ‘docking strand’ (DS), which we conjugated to the C-terminus of DesAbs creates a blinking effect. Hence, a highly resolved image can be reconstructed from plotting the measured positions of the hydrolyzed DNA state. Using this technique to image protein aggregates in human cerebrospinal fluid and serum will provide novel insights into the composition, structure, size and number of aggregates present in those samples.