Nanobodies are single chain antibodies which have revolutionary applications in structural biology. Our Nanobody Discovery service is accessible to all Instruct researchers.
Instruct has 1 centre offering Nanobody Discovery across Europe. Navigate the map and click on the pins to discover centres near you.
Nanobodies are the small (15 kDa) and stable single-domain fragments harboring the full antigen-binding capacity of camelid heavy chain–only antibodies. Nanobodies are exquisite chaperones for crystallising membrane proteins, multiprotein assemblies, transient conformational states and intrinsically disordered proteins.
Nanobodies can also be used for other applications in structural biology. Domain-specific Nanobodies have been used in single-particle electron microscopy (EM) to track these domains in particle projections. Because Nanobodies can be functionally expressed as intrabodies in eukaryotic cells, these single-domain antibodies can also be used to track their targets inside a living cell.
Only small amounts (<2mg) of the folded and quality controlled protein are required to produce Nanobodies that recognise conformational epitopes on the native proteins. In case no purified antigen is available, cells expressing purified protein or genetic vaccination may be used to induce an in vivo matured humoral response.
With support from Instruct-ULTRA, we have developed our Megabody technology. We used megabodies to solve the high resolution cryo-EM structures of membrane proteins that are too small by themselves to align the single particle images or that suffer from severe preferential orientation. Megabodies are now available to the scientific community through the Nanobodies4Instruct facility.
