BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Clasped together

Highly specific detection of epigenetic marks via antigen-clasping antibodies

March 17, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

A team at the University of Chicago has identified two antibodies that recognize an epigenetic marker via a new, highly specific "antigen-clasping" modality. The authors think the unusual antibodies could be a shot in the arm for epigenetics-based diagnostics, an area that's been hamstrung by the difficulty of creating antibodies able to differentiate one epigenetic modification from another.

Shohei Koide told BioCentury his team wasn't looking for a new binding modality when it started using directed evolution to find antibodies targeting trimethylated histone H3. ...