Engineered protein scaffolds for molecular recognition

The use of so-called protein scaffolds has recently attracted considerable attention in biochemistry in the context of generating novel types of ligand receptors for various applications in research and medicine. This development started with the notion that immunoglobulins owe their function to the composition of a conserved framework region and a spatially well-defined antigen-binding site made of peptide segments that are hypervariable both in sequence and in conformation. After the application of antibody engineering methods along with library techniques had resulted in first successes in the selection of functional antibody fragments, several laboratories began to exploit other types of protein architectures for the construction of practically useful binding proteins. Properties like small size of the receptor protein, stability and ease of production were the focus of this work. Hence, among others, single domains of antibodies or of the immunoglobulin superfamily, protease inhibitors, helix-bundle proteins, disulphide-knotted peptides and lipocalins were investigated. Recently, the scaffold concept has even been adopted for the construction of enzymes. However, it appears that not all kinds of polypeptide fold which may appear attractive for the engineering of loop regions at a first glance will indeed permit the construction of independent ligand-binding sites with high affinities and specificities. This review will therefore concentrate on the critical description of the structural properties of experimentally tested protein scaffolds and of the novel functions that have been achieved on their basis, rather than on the methodology of how to best select a particular mutant with a certain activity. An overview will be provided about the current approaches, and some emerging trends will be identified. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.