Designing, docking and heterologous expression of an anti-HER2 affibody molecule

Affibody molecules are small protein scaffolds mostly based on triple-helical bundle protein domains. Many triple helix-based affibody proteins have shown prominent properties for tumor imaging and therapy. In our opinion, the structural organizations and the sizes of affibody molecules could be modified to increase their recognition abilities and binding affinities to human epidermal growth factor receptor type 2 (HER2). Thereby, the purpose of this study was to design and characterize a novel platform of affibody molecule consisting of five separate helixes (encoding 99 amino acids with a duplicate of helixes 1 and 2 at N-terminus plus GGGC chelator peptide sequence at C-terminus) enable of binding to HER2 with higher avidity. Using in silico screening methods, the structure and the interactive potential of designed affibody was comparatively investigated. The molecular expression and production of the designed affibody in Escherichia coli cells was successfully examined and reported.