Rapid and robust antibody Fab fragment crystallization utilizing edge-to-edge beta-sheet packing

Antibody therapeutics are one of the most important classes of drugs. Antibody structures have become an integral part of predicting the behavior of potential therapeutics, either directly or as the basis of modeling. Structures of Fab:antigen complexes have even greater value. While the crystallization and structure determination of Fabs is easy relative to many other protein classes, especially membrane proteins, broad screening and optimization of crystalline hits is still necessary. Through a comprehensive review of rabbit Fab crystal contacts and their incompatibility with human Fabs, we identified a small secondary structural element from the rabbit light chain constant domain potentially responsible for hindering the crystallization of human Fabs. Upon replacing the human kappa constant domain FG loop (HQGLSSP) with the two residue shorter rabbit loop (QGTTS), we dramatically improved the crystallization of human Fabs and Fab:antigen complexes. Our design, which we call “Crystal Kappa”, enables rapid crystallization of human fabs and fab complexes in a broad range of conditions, with less material in smaller screens or from dilute solutions.

The table below summarises the geometric issues observed across the polymeric chains and their fit to the electron density. The red, orange, yellow and green segments on the lower bar indicate the fraction of residues that contain outliers for >=3, 2, 1 and 0 types of geometric quality criteria respectively. A grey segment represents the fraction of residues that are not modelled. The numeric value for each fraction is indicated below the corresponding segment, with a dot representing fractions <=5% The upper red bar (where present) indicates the fraction of residues that have poor fit to the electron density. The numeric value is given above the bar.

Mol Chain Length
Quality of chain 2 Entry composition i ○ There are 3 unique types of molecules in this entry. The entry contains 13743 atoms, of which 0 are hydrogens and 0 are deuteriums.
In the tables below, the ZeroOcc column contains the number of atoms modelled with zero occupancy, the AltConf column contains the number of residues with at least one atom in alternate conformation and the Trace column contains the number of residues modelled with at most 2 atoms.
• Molecule 1 is a protein called Dupilumab Fab heavy chain. 3 Residue-property plots i ○ These plots are drawn for all protein, RNA and DNA chains in the entry. The first graphic for a chain summarises the proportions of the various outlier classes displayed in the second graphic. The second graphic shows the sequence view annotated by issues in geometry and electron density. Residues are color-coded according to the number of geometric quality criteria for which they contain at least one outlier: green = 0, yellow = 1, orange = 2 and red = 3 or more. A red dot above a residue indicates a poor fit to the electron density (RSRZ > 2). Stretches of 2 or more consecutive residues without any outlier are shown as a green connector. Residues present in the sample, but not in the model, are shown in grey.

Mol Chain Residues
•  ) 28.0 wwPDB-VP Xtriage's analysis on translational NCS is as follows: The analyses of the Patterson function reveals a significant off-origin peak that is 34.17 % of the origin peak, indicating pseudo-translational symmetry. The chance of finding a peak of this or larger height randomly in a structure without pseudo-translational symmetry is equal to 7.1219e-04. The detected translational NCS is most likely also responsible for the elevated intensity ratio. Chiral center outliers are detected by calculating the chiral volume of a chiral center and verifying if the center is modelled as a planar moiety or with the opposite hand.A planarity outlier is detected by checking planarity of atoms in a peptide group, atoms in a mainchain group or atoms of a sidechain that are expected to be planar.

Mol Chain #Chirality outliers #Planarity outliers
There are no bond length outliers.
There are no bond angle outliers.
There are no chirality outliers.  The all-atom clashscore is defined as the number of clashes found per 1000 atoms (including hydrogen atoms). The all-atom clashscore for this structure is 1.
All (20) close contacts within the same asymmetric unit are listed below, sorted by their clash magnitude. There are no symmetry-related clashes.

Protein backbone i ○
In the following table, the Percentiles column shows the percent Ramachandran outliers of the chain as a percentile score with respect to all X-ray entries followed by that with respect to entries of similar resolution.
The Analysed column shows the number of residues for which the backbone conformation was analysed, and the total number of residues. There are no Ramachandran outliers to report.

Protein sidechains i ○
In the following table, the Percentiles column shows the percent sidechain outliers of the chain as a percentile score with respect to all X-ray entries followed by that with respect to entries of similar resolution.
The Analysed column shows the number of residues for which the sidechain conformation was analysed, and the total number of residues. 5.4 Non-standard residues in protein, DNA, RNA chains i ○ There are no non-standard protein/DNA/RNA residues in this entry.

Carbohydrates i ○
There are no carbohydrates in this entry.

Ligand geometry i ○
There are no ligands in this entry.

Other polymers i ○
There are no such residues in this entry.

Polymer linkage issues i ○
There are no chain breaks in this entry. 6 Fit of model and data i ○ 6.1 Protein, DNA and RNA chains i ○ In the following table, the column labelled '#RSRZ> 2' contains the number (and percentage) of RSRZ outliers, followed by percent RSRZ outliers for the chain as percentile scores relative to all X-ray entries and entries of similar resolution. The OWAB column contains the minimum, median, 95 th percentile and maximum values of the occupancy-weighted average B-factor per residue. The column labelled 'Q< 0.9' lists the number of (and percentage) of residues with an average occupancy less than 0.9.