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Have a lovely Christmas and Happy New Year!

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Meet us at the ASCB/EMBO 2018 meeting in San Diego, CA, USA from December 08th to 12th, 2018.

This event will bring together experts and scientists to discuss the latest advances and developments in Cell Biology through various thematics of lifescience. The symposium will host workshops and poster sessions to visit between various talks.

Dr. Petra Tafelmeyer, Director of Scientific Project USA will attend this meeting. She will be waiting for your visit, booth #741.

Feel free to contact us if you want to arrange a meeting with her to discuss your project or learn more about Hybribody.

Tweet Add to Calendar 12-08-2018 00:00:00 12-12-2018 00:00:00 35 Meet Hybrigenics at ASCB 2019, booth 741 Join us for the 2018 ASCB|EMBO Meeting, focusing on cell biology as the fundamental basis of biology and exploring more specialized fields, such as neurobiology and stem cell biology. San Diego, CA, USA ASCB true MM/DD/YYYY

The Llama to rescue the plants or how VHH may replace pesticides.

In the paper from B. De Coninck et al. 2017 the authors take advantage of VHH (single domain antibodies) from Llamas to protect plants from fungal infection.

VHH or nanobodies are single domain antibodies presenting multiple advantages. Due to their small size they are very stable and easy to produce and still retain a high affinity and specificity for antigens.

The authors chose to target the fungal glucosylceramides (fGlcCer), a ubiquitous component of eukaryotes membrane already known to be the target of plant defensins (the antimicrobial peptides produced by plants). They immunized Llamas with several fGlcCer, to construct a library of VHH from the blood mononuclear cells. Then the library was screened by phage display.
The selected VHH show a good binding to the fungal GlcCer and no cross reactivity with GlcCer from plants or mammalian. Furthermore, when incubated with different fungi the VHH is able to inhibit the fungal growth in a comparable way to the defensins. Finally, when simply sprayed on tomato leaves, the VHH reduces the symptoms caused by a fungal infection as you can see in the picture below.

Fig. 5. Extracted from the paper B. De Coninck et al. 2017. (A) The diagram shows the difference in lesion diameters between the control (grey bars) and the treated leaves (white bars). (B) The photo shows tomato leaves non treated by the spray of VHH vs treated tomato leaves.

These results open the possibilities to use VHH as an alternative to fungicides or insecticides and more.

With Hybribody, you can select and validate high quality synthetic VHH without immunizing any animal. It's faster, more cost effective and of course, the llamas will thank you.

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The 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to 3 scientists. One half to Frances H. Arnold, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, USA, "for the directed evolution of enzymes" and the other half jointly to George P. Smith, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA, and Sir Gregory P. Winter, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, "for the phage display of peptides and antibodies."

The Phage display technique was first described in 1985 by George Smith and has been a formidable tool since. It consists of using the ability of bacteriophages to "display" proteins on their coat by inserting a gene encoding for a specific protein into the phage's genetic material. The specific protein will then be displayed outside the phage on its coat which allows to study protein–protein, protein–peptide, and protein–DNA interactions.

In 1991 the phage display technique was succesfully used for the first time to express antibodies at the phage surface. It is now widely used for in vitro antibody selection.

With this Nobel Prize we can see that this technique is still a powerful tool for the Biotechnology research.

At Hybrigenics, we use this technique coupled with our synthetic VHH library to select highly specific VHH antibodies in vitro, without animal immunization.

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