Expanding and improving nanobody repertoires using a yeast display method: Targeting SARS-CoV-2

COVID-19, caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, repre-sents a serious worldwide health issue, with continually emerging new variants challenging current therapeutics. One promising alternate therapeutic avenue is represented by nanobodies, small single-chain antibodies derived from cam-elids with numerous advantageous properties and the potential to neutralize the virus. For identification and characterization of a broad spectrum of anti-SARS-CoV-2 Spike nanobodies, we further optimized a yeast display method, leveraging a previously published mass spectrometry-based method, using B-cell complementary DNA from the same immunized animals as a source of VHH sequences. Yeast display captured many of the sequences identified by the previous approach, as well as many additional sequences that proved to encode a large new repertoire of nanobodies with high affinities and neutralization activities against different SARS-CoV-2 variants. We evaluated DNA shuffling applied to the three complementarity-deter-mining regions of antiviral nanobodies. The results suggested a surprising degree of modularity to complementarity-deter-mining region function. Importantly, the yeast display approach applied to nanobody libraries from immunized ani-mals allows parallel interrogation of a vast number of nano-bodies. For example, we employed a modified yeast display to carry out massively parallel epitope binning. The current yeast display approach proved comparable in efficiency and speci-ficity to the mass spectrometry-based approach, while requiring none of the infrastructure and expertise required for that approach, making these highly complementary approaches that together appear to comprehensively explore the paratope space. The larger repertoires produced maximize the likelihood of discovering broadly specific reagents and those that powerfully synergize in mixtures.

Automated summary

COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, is a global health issue with emerging variants. Nanobodies derived from camels show potential to neutralize the virus. By optimizing a yeast display method, a large repertoire of high-affinity and neutralizing nanobodies against different SARS-CoV-2 variants was identified. The yeast display approach is comparable to mass spectrometry and allows for parallel interrogation of a vast number of nanobodies, maximizing the likelihood of discovering broadly specific reagents.