Optimal fusion of antibody binding domains resulted in higher affinity and wider specificity

• A series of antibody binding proteins PAxPG is made from protein A and protein G.
• Linkage of the domains by a flexible linker yielded higher affinity than the parents.
• Optimization of the linker length resulted in higher affinity to hIgG Fab and Fc.
• With its high affinity, PAxPG will be a useful probe to many Abs including mIgG1.

Antibody is a very important protein in biotechnological and biomedical fields because of its high affinity and specificity to various antigens. Due to the rise of human antibody therapeutics, its cost-effective purification is an urgent issue for bio-industry. In this study, we made novel fusion proteins PAxPG with a flexible (DDAKK)n linker between the two Ig binding domains derived from Staphylococcus protein A and Streptococcus protein G. The fusion proteins bound human and mouse IgGs and their fragments with up to 58-times higher affinity and wider specificity than the parental binding domains. Interestingly, the optimal linker for human Fab fragment was n = 4, which was close to the modeled distance between the termini of domains bound to heavy chain, implying increased avidity as a possible mechanism. For binding to Fc, the longest n = 6 linker gave the highest affinity, implying longer interchain distance between the two binding sites. The novel fusion protein with optimized interdomain linker length will be a useful tool for the purification and detection of various IgGs including mouse IgG1 that binds only weakly to natural protein A.