Next-Generation Binder Discovery – Generating Multipurpose DARPins for Innovative Applications

Speaker
Jonas V. Schaefer, PhD, Head of High-Throughput Binder Selection Facility, Department of Biochemistry University of Zurich

Abstract
Obtaining high-quality and reliable affinity reagents remains a major challenge for many scientific projects - frequently, commercial antibodies fail to behave as advertised or only work for a subset of samples. Therefore, we established a High-Throughput Binder Selection Facility, generating hundreds of high-end binders (so called DARPins) that specifically recognize different, non-overlapping epitopes at their targets with high affinities. Those binders have already been used in a variety of applications both in-house and by numerous international collaboration partners, improving existing and enabling novel, so far unfeasible applications.

Within my presentation, I will give insights into our streamlined and robust binder generation pipeline and show examples of DARPin applications - amongst others, DARPins have been successfully employed in advanced microscopy, in elucidating intracellular pathways (pulldowns, intracellular inhibitors, fluorescent real-time biosensors... ) or for structure determination (as co-crystallization chaperones).