A toolbox of nanobodies developed and validated for use as intrabodies and nanoscale immunolabels in brain neurons
- University of California, Davis, United States
- University of Washington, United States
- Stanford School of Medicine, United States
Abstract
Nanobodies (nAbs) are small, minimal antibodies that have distinct attributes that make them uniquely suited for certain biomedical research, diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Prominent uses include as intracellular antibodies or intrabodies to bind and deliver cargo to specific proteins and/or subcellular sites within cells, and as nanoscale immunolabels for enhanced tissue penetration and improved spatial imaging resolution. Here, we report the generation and validation of nAbs against a set of proteins prominently expressed at specific subcellular sites in mammalian brain neurons. We describe a novel hierarchical validation pipeline to systematically evaluate nAbs isolated by phage display for effective and specific use as intrabodies and immunolabels in mammalian cells including brain neurons. These nAbs form part of a robust toolbox for targeting proteins with distinct and highly spatially-restricted subcellular localization in mammalian brain neurons, allowing for visualization and/or modulation of structure and function at those sites.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
L Fernando Santana
Funding
National Institutes of Health (U01NS099714)
- James S Trimmer
National Institutes of Health (U24NS109113)
- James S Trimmer
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures involving llamas were performed at Triple J Farms of Kent Laboratories (Bellingham, WA) in strict accordance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the NIH. All procedures involving rats were approved by the University of California, Davis, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) under protocols 20485 and 21265 and were performed in strict accordance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the NIH. All rats were maintained under standard light-dark cycles and allowed to feed and drink ad libitum. All procedures involving mice were approved by the Stanford University IACUC under protocol 18846 and were performed in strict accordance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the NIH.
Copyright
© 2019, Dong et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A toolbox of nanobodies developed and validated for use as intrabodies and nanoscale immunolabels in brain neurons
eLife 8:e48750.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48750
Further reading
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When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
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Human-specific cognitive abilities depend on information processing in the cerebral cortex, where the neurons are significantly larger and their processes longer and sparser compared to rodents. We found that, in synaptically connected layer 2/3 pyramidal cells (L2/3 PCs), the delay in signal propagation from soma to soma is similar in humans and rodents. To compensate for the longer processes of neurons, membrane potential changes in human axons and/or dendrites must propagate faster. Axonal and dendritic recordings show that the propagation speed of action potentials (APs) is similar in human and rat axons, but the forward propagation of excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) and the backward propagation of APs are 26 and 47% faster in human dendrites, respectively. Experimentally-based detailed biophysical models have shown that the key factor responsible for the accelerated EPSP propagation in human cortical dendrites is the large conductance load imposed at the soma by the large basal dendritic tree. Additionally, larger dendritic diameters and differences in cable and ion channel properties in humans contribute to enhanced signal propagation. Our integrative experimental and modeling study provides new insights into the scaling rules that help maintain information processing speed albeit the large and sparse neurons in the human cortex.
