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Discover how PEPperPRINT Peptide Microarray products have been used in different fields of research.

Detection of specific IgE against linear epitopes from Gal d 1 has additional value in diagnosing hen’s egg allergy in adults

Ehlers, Anna M.; Otten, Henny G.; Wierzba, Eva; Flügge, Ulrike; Le, Thuy-My; Knulst, André C.; Suer, Waltraud
Background Although hen’s egg allergy is more prevalent in children, up to 0.6% of adults from different European countries suffers from a persistent or newly-onset hen’s egg allergy, making accurate diagnosis in adults necessary. However, sensitisation to hen’s egg extracts, components and linear epitopes are solely studied in children. Methods Hen’s egg allergic (n=16) and tolerant (n=20) adults were selected by sensitisation towards recombinant components rGal d 1 and/or 3. Sensitisation profiles towards egg white and yolk extract and the native components Gal d 1, 2, 3 and 4 were respectively evaluated with the ImmunoCAP or the EUROLINE system. Characterisation of linear epitopes was performed with a peptide microarray containing 15mer peptides representing the entire sequence of mature Gal d 1 and 3. Results Overall, sIgE titres against hen’s egg extracts and single components overlapped largely between allergic and tolerant adults. Although the median sIgE/sIgG4 ratio to Gal d 1 was increased in allergic adults, the range was comparable between both groups. Clinically relevant sensitisation to Gal d 1 was confirmed by sIgE-binding to the linear epitopes aa30-41, aa39-50 or aa84-95 in 6/13 allergic adults, mainly suffering from objective symptoms. In comparison, these epitopes were recognized by 1/15 tolerant patient. Only a few linear epitopes were detected for Gal d 3, suggesting a greater importance of conformational epitopes for the recognition of Gal d 3. Conclusion and Clinical Relevance Specific IgE-binding to linear epitopes of Gal d 1 is highly specific in identifying hen’s egg allergic adults with objective symptoms.

Rapid response to pandemic threats: immunogenic epitope detection of pandemic pathogens for diagnostics and vaccine development using peptide microarrays

Heiss, Kirsten; Heidepriem, Jasmin; Fischer, Nico; Weber, Laura K; Dahlke, Christine; Jaenisch, Thomas; Loeffler, Felix F
J. Proteome Res..
Sep 2020
Emergence and re-emergence of pathogens bearing the risk of becoming a pandemic threat are on the rise. Increased travel and trade, growing population density, changes in urbanization, and climate have a critical impact on infectious disease spread. Currently, the world is confronted with the emergence of a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, responsible for yet more than 500 000 deaths globally. Outbreaks caused by viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, HIV, Ebola, influenza, and Zika have increased over the last decade, underlining the urgent need for a rapid development of diagnostics and vaccines. Hence, the rational identification of biomarkers for diagnostic measures on the one hand, and antigenic targets for vaccine development on the other, are of utmost importance. Peptide microarrays can display large numbers of putative target proteins translated into overlapping linear (and cyclic) peptides. Using these highly diverse libraries, covering tens of thousands of peptides, allow for the in-depth analysis of antibody signatures in a multiplexed, high-throughput fashion. In this review, we highlight synthesis platforms that facilitate fast and highly flexible generation of high-density peptide microarrays. We further outline the multifaceted applications of these peptide array platforms for the development of serological tests and vaccines, to quickly encounter pandemic threats.

Molecular and Serological Tests for COVID-19. A Comparative Review of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Laboratory and Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Kubina, Robert; Dziedzic, Arkadiusz
Validated and accurate laboratory testing for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a crucial part of the timely management of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) disease, supporting the clinical decision-making process for infection control at the healthcare level and detecting asymptomatic cases. This would facilitate an appropriate treatment, a prompt isolation and consequently deceleration of the pandemic. Various laboratory tests can identify the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 in specimens, or specific anti-viral antibodies in blood/serum. Due to the current pandemic situation, a development of point-of-care diagnostics (POCD) allows us to substantially accelerate taking clinical decisions and implement strategic planning at the national level of preventative measures. This review summarizes and compares the available POCD and those currently under development, including quantitative reverse transcription PCR (RT-qPCR), serology immunoassays (SIAs) and protein microarray method (PMM) designed for standard and rapid COVID-19 diagnosis.

On‐Chip Neo‐Glycopeptide Synthesis for Multivalent Glycan Presentation

Mende, Marco; Tsouka, Alexandra; Heidepriem, Jasmin; Paris, Grigori; Mattes, Daniela S.; Eickelmann, Stephan; Bordoni, Vittorio; Wawrzinek, Robert; Fuchsberger, Felix F.; Seeberger, Peter H.; Rademacher, Christoph; Delbianco, Martina; Mallagaray, Alvaro; Loeffler, Felix F
Chem. Eur. J..
Apr 2020
Single glycan–protein interactions are often weak, such that glycan binding partners commonly utilize multiple, spatially defined binding sites to enhance binding avidity and specificity. Current array technologies usually neglect defined multivalent display. Laser-based array synthesis technology allows for flexible and rapid on-surface synthesis of different peptides. By combining this technique with click chemistry, neo-glycopeptides were produced directly on a functionalized glass slide in the microarray format. Density and spatial distribution of carbohydrates can be tuned, resulting in well-defined glycan structures for multivalent display. The two lectins concanavalin A and langerin were probed with different glycans on multivalent scaffolds, revealing strong spacing-, density-, and ligand-dependent binding. In addition, we could also measure the surface dissociation constant. This approach allows for a rapid generation, screening, and optimization of a multitude of multivalent scaffolds for glycan binding.

Autoantibody Signature in Cardiac Arrest

Maguy, Ange; Tardif, Jean-Claude; Busseuil, David; Ribi, Camillo; Li, Jin
Circulation.
Apr 2020
Background: Cardiac arrest is a tragic event that causes one death roughly every 90 seconds worldwide. Survivors generally undergo a work-up to identify the etiology of arrest. However, 5-10% of cardiac arrest remain unexplained. As cardiac arrhythmias mostly underlie cardiac arrest and increasing evidence strongly supports the involvement of autoantibodies in arrhythmogenesis, a large-panel autoantibody screening was performed in cardiac arrest patients. Methods: This is an observational, cross-sectional study of patients from the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) hospital cohort, a single center registry of participants. A peptide microarray was designed to screen for IgG targeting epitopes from all known cardiac ion channels with extracellular domains. Plasma samples from 23 patients with unexplained cardiac arrest were compared to 22 cardiac arrest cases of ischemic origin and a group of 29 age-, sex- and BMI-matched healthy subjects. The false discovery rate (FDR), LASSO logistic regression and random forest methods were jointly carried out to find significant differential IgG responses. Results: The autoantibody against the pore domain of the L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (Ca v 1.2) was consistently identified as a biomarker of idiopathic cardiac arrest (P=0.002, FDR=0.007, classification accuracies ≥0.83). Functional studies on human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes demonstrated that the anti-Ca v 1.2 IgG purified from patients with idiopathic cardiac arrest is proarrhythmogenic by reducing the action potential duration through calcium channel inhibition. Conclusions: The present report addresses the concept of autoimmunity and cardiac arrest. Hitherto unknown autoantibodies targeting extracellular sequences of cardiac ion channels were detected. Moreover, the study identified an autoantibody signature specific to patients with cardiac arrest.

Plasmodium Falciparum and Plasmodium Vivax Vaccine

Werner, Ekkehard
Apr 2020
The present invention relates to a vaccine V comprising (A) at least one isolated polypeptide strand P comprising or consisting of at least nine consecutive amino acid moieties of the repetitive organellar protein, putative of Plasmodium falciparum or the hypothetical protein PVNG_04523 of Plasmodium vivax or a polynucleotide strand encoding for such polypeptide; and (B) at least one pharmaceutically acceptable carrier or excipient. Furthermore, the present invention refers to an antibody binding to the repetitive organellar protein,putative of Plasmodium falciparumor the hypothetical protein PVNG_04523 of Plasmodium vivax or a polynucleotide strand encoding therefor, to a method of generating such antibody and uses thereof.

Discovery of putative breast cancer antigens using an integrative platform of genomics-driven immunoproteomics

Qendro, Veneta; Lundgren, Deborah H.; Palczewski, Samuel; Hegde, Poornima; Stevenson, Christina; Perpetua, Laurie; Latifi, Ardian; Merriman, Jesse; Bugos, Grace; Han, David K.
Proteomics.
Aug 2018
Recent advances in cancer immuno-therapeutics such as checkpoint inhibitors, chimeric antigen-receptor T cells, and tumor infiltrating T cells (TIL) are now significantly impacting cancer patients in a positive manner. Although very promising, reports indicate no more than 25% of cases result in complete remission. One of the limitations of these treatments is the identity of putative cancer antigens in each patient, as it is technically challenging to identify cancer antigens in a rapid fashion. Thus, identification of cancer antigens followed by targeted treatment will increase the efficacy of cancer immunotherapies. To achieve this goal, a combined technologies platform of deep genomic sequencing and personalized immune assessment was devised, termed Genomics Driven Immunoproteomics (GDI). Using this technological platform, we report the discovery of 149 tumor antigens from human breast cancer patients. Significant number of these putative cancer antigens arise from single nucleotide variants (SNVs), as well as insertions and deletions that results into frame-shift mutations. We propose a general model of anti-cancer immunity and suggest that the GDI platform may help identify patient-specific tumor antigens in a timely fashion for precision immunotherapies.

Circulating GRP78 antibodies from ovarian cancer patients: a promising tool for cancer cell targeting drug delivery system?

Van Hoesen, Kylie; Meynier, Sonia; Ribaux, Pascale; Petignat, Patrick; Delie, Florence; Cohen, Marie
Oncotarget.
Dec 2017
Glucose-regulated protein 78 (GRP78) is a chaperone protein that has a high frequency in tumor cells. Normally it is found in the endoplasmic reticulum to assist in protein folding, but under cellular stress, GRP78 influences proliferative signaling pathways at the cell surface. The increased expression elicits autoantibody production, providing a biomarker of ovarian cancer, as well as other types of cancer. This study aims to determine the epitope recognition of GRP78 autoantibodies isolated from serum of ovarian cancer patients and use the identified antibodies to design new drug delivery systems to specifically target cancer cells. We first confirmed that the membrane GRP78 levels are increased in ovarian cancer cells and positively correlate with proliferation. However, the level of circulating GRP78 autoantibodies did not correlate with membrane GRP78 expression in ovarian cancer cells and was lower, although not significantly, compared to control patients. We then determined the epitope recognition of GRP78 autoantibodies and showed that treatment with paclitaxel-loaded nanoparticles coated with anti-GRP78 antibodies significantly decreased tumor development in chick embryo culture of ovarian cancer cell tumors compared to paclitaxel treatment alone. This evidence suggests that nanoparticle drug delivery systems coupled with antibodies against GRP78 has potential as a powerful therapy against ovarian cancer.

Bayesian Analysis of MicroScale Thermophoresis Data to Quantify Affinity of Protein:Protein Interactions with Human Survivin

Garcia-Bonete, Maria-Jose; Jensen, Maja; Recktenwald, Christian V.; Rocha, Sandra; Stadler, Volker; Bokarewa, Maria; Katona, Gergely
Sci Rep.
Dec 2017
A biomolecular ensemble exhibits different responses to a temperature gradient depending on its diffusion properties. MicroScale Thermophoresis technique exploits this effect and is becoming a popular technique for analyzing interactions of biomolecules in solution. When comparing affinities of related compounds, the reliability of the determined thermodynamic parameters often comes into question. The thermophoresis binding curves can be assessed by Bayesian inference, which provides a probability distribution for the dissociation constant of the interacting partners. By applying Bayesian machine learning principles, binding curves can be autonomously analyzed without manual intervention and without introducing subjective bias by outlier rejection. We demonstrate the Bayesian inference protocol on the known survivin:borealin interaction and on the putative protein-protein interactions between human survivin and two members of the human Shugoshin-like family (hSgol1 and hSgol2). These interactions were identified in a protein microarray binding assay against survivin and confirmed by MicroScale Thermophoresis.

Development and analytical performance of a new ARCHITECT automated dipeptidyl peptidase-4 immunoassay

Hemken, Philip M.; Jeanblanc, Nicolette M.; Rae, Tracey; Brophy, Susan E.; Datwyler, Maria J.; Xu, Ying; Manetz, T. Scott; Vainshtein, Inna; Liang, Meina; Xiao, Xiaodong; Chowdhury, Partha S.; Chang, Chien-ying; Streicher, Katie; Greenlees, Lydia; Ranade, Koustubh; Davis, Gerard J.
Practical Laboratory Medicine.
Dec 2017
Background Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) may be a suitable biomarker to identify people with severe asthma who have greater activation of the interleukin-13 (IL-13) pathway and may therefore benefit from IL-13-targeted treatments. We report the analytical performance of an Investigational Use Only immunoassay and provide data on the biological range of DPP-4 concentrations. Methods We assessed assay performance, utilising analyses of precision, linearity and sensitivity; interference from common endogenous assay interferents, and from asthma and anti-diabetic medications, were also assessed. The assay was used to measure the range of serum DPP-4 concentrations in healthy volunteers and subjects with diabetes and severe, uncontrolled asthma. Results The total precision of DPP-4 concentration measurement (determined using percentage coefficient of variation) was ≤5% over 20 days. Dilution analysis yielded linear results from 30 to 1305 ng/mL; the limit of quantitation was 19.2 ng/mL. No notable endogenous or drug interferences were observed at the expected therapeutic concentration. Median DPP-4 concentrations in healthy volunteers and subjects with asthma or Type 1 diabetes were assessed, with concentrations remaining similar in subjects with diabetes and asthma across different demographics. Conclusion These analyses indicate that the ARCHITECT DPP-4 Immunoassay is a reliable and robust method for measuring serum DPP-4 concentration.

Identification of two conserved B-cell epitopes in the gp90 of reticuloendothelial virus using peptide microarray

Khairy, Wiaam O.A.; Qian, Kun; Shao, Hongxia; Ye, Jianqiang; Qin, Aijian
Veterinary Microbiology.
Nov 2017
Since the gp90 protein of Reticuloendotheliosis virus (REV) plays vital roles in virus neutralization, so detailed analysis of REV-gp90 epitopes is important for the development of epitope based marker vaccines and diagnostic tools for REV infections. In this study, two monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) namely 6C12 and 09980 were used to map the epitopes in REVgp90 using peptide microarray and ELISA. Peptide microarray revealed that mAbs 6C12 and 09980 recognized 216YHPLA220 and 230DPQTSDILEA239 motifs, respectively. This result was confirmed by ELISA using synthetic peptides. Moreover, homology analysis indicated that mAbs defined epitopes are highly conserved among REV strains used in this study. The mAbs and their epitopes identified in this study may have potential applications in development of diagnostic techniques and epitope-based marker vaccines for control of REV infections.

Antibody fingerprints in lyme disease deciphered with high density peptide arrays

Weber, Laura K.; Isse, Awale; Rentschler, Simone; Kneusel, Richard E.; Palermo, Andrea; Hubbuch, Jürgen; Nesterov-Mueller, Alexander; Breitling, Frank; Loeffler, Felix F.
Eng. Life Sci..
Oct 2017
Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne infectious disease in Europe and North America. Previous studies discovered the immunogenic role of a surface-exposed lipoprotein (VlsE) of Borreliella burgdorferi. We employed high density peptide arrays to investigate the antibody response to the VlsE protein in VlsE-positive patients by mapping the protein as overlapping peptides and subsequent in-depth epitope substitution analyses. These investigations led to the identification of antibody fingerprints represented by a number of key residues that are indispensable for the binding of the respective antibody. This approach allows us to compare the antibody specificities of different patients to the resolution of single amino acids. Our study revealed that the sera of VlsE-positive patients recognize different epitopes on the protein. Remarkably, in those cases where the same epitope is targeted, the antibody fingerprint is almost identical. Furthermore, we could correlate two fingerprints with human autoantigens and an Epstein-Barr virus epitope; yet, the link to autoimmune disorders seems unlikely and must be investigated in further studies. The other three fingerprints are much more specific for B. burgdorferi. Since antibody fingerprints of longer sequences have proven to be highly disease specific, our findings suggest that the fingerprints could function as diagnostic markers that can reduce false positive test results.

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