Experimental and Computational Studies on Domain-Swapped Structure Stabilization of an Antibody Light Chain by Disulfide Bond Introduction

Development of different platforms would be useful for designing functional antibodies to improve the efficiency of antibody-based drugs. Three-dimensional domain swapping (3D-DS) may occur in the variable region of antibody light chain #4C214A, and a pair of domain-swapped dimers may interact with each other to form a tetramer. In this study, to stabilize the 3D-DS dimer structure in #4C214A, Val2 in strand A (swapping region) and Thr97 in strand G were replaced with Cys residues, generating #4 V2C/T97C/C214A with a Cys2–Cys97 disulfide bond that cross-links strands A and G of different protomers. The #4 V2C/T97C/C214A tetramer did not dissociate into monomers at low protein concentration (6 μM); however, some of the tetramers were converted to monomers by disulfide bond reduction. Two-dimensional free energy profile analysis for the tetramerization of two 3D-DS dimers was performed by molecular dynamics simulation. These results show that disulfide bond introduction is useful for controlling the dimerization/dissociation of the variable region through 3D-DS.