ArticleNature methods2021
Megabodies expand the nanobody toolkit for protein structure determination by single-particle cryo-EM.
Article in Nature methods, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 86 papers.
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Who cites it
86 citing papers in PubMed, 149 citations in OpenAlex.
- Protein Engineering-Enabled Cryo-EM Investigation of Small GTPases.Journal of molecular biology · 2026Article
- A Picomolar MBP-Binding Nanobody for Target Enrichment and Modular Complex Engineering.ACS bio & med chem Au · 2026Article
- Molecular arrangement and modulation of extrasynaptic αβδ GABANature communications · 2026Article
- Structural basis for activation and potentiation in a human α5β3 GABANature communications · 2026Article
- Visualization of the interaction between sphingomyelin and cholesterol in lipid bilayer membranes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Exploiting plant immune "switches" for resistance engineering.Stress biology · 2026Review
- Tiny tools closing the gap: nanobodies in research and therapy.Function (Oxford, England) · 2026Review
- Modular Scaffold Crystals for Programmable Installation and Structural Observation of DNA-Binding Proteins.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Trimbody with rigid AI-designed scaffolds enables atomic-resolution cryo-EM structure determination of small proteins.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Structural analysis of rhodopsin states in megabody complexes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Designing Rigid Protein Fiducials to Visualize GPCR Conformational States.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Enhancing the sensitivity of nanobodies through covalent and non-covalent polymerization.RSC advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Antibody-enabled structural biology and AI-driven antibody design.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2026Review
- Nanobodies in biomedicine: from molecular characteristics to fabrication and clinical translation.Military Medical Research · 2026Review
- Hidden gems bring proteins into view.Nature chemical biology · 2026Article
- Covalently constrained 'Di-Gembodies' enable parallel structure solutions by cryo-EM.Nature chemical biology · 2026Article
- Design and Optimization of BRIL Fusion Constructs for Membrane Protein Cryo-EM Studies.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Structural determination of small proteins by cryo-EM using a coiled coil module strategy.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Sub-3 Å resolution protein structure determination by single-particle cryo-EM at 100 keV.Structure (London, England : 1993) · 2025Article
26 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
18 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Nanobodies are popular and versatile tools for structural biology. They have a compact single immunoglobulin domain organization, bind target proteins with high affinities while reducing their conformational heterogeneity and stabilize multi-protein complexes. Here we demonstrate that engineered nanobodies can also help overcome two major obstacles that limit the resolution of single-particle cryo-electron microscopy reconstructions: particle size and preferential orientation at the water-air interfaces. We have developed and characterized constructs, termed megabodies, by grafting nanobodies onto selected protein scaffolds to increase their molecular weight while retaining the full antigen-binding specificity and affinity. We show that the megabody design principles are applicable to different scaffold proteins and recognition domains of compatible geometries and are amenable for efficient selection from yeast display libraries. Moreover, we demonstrate that megabodies can be used to obtain three-dimensional reconstructions for membrane proteins that suffer from severe preferential orientation or are otherwise too small to allow accurate particle alignment.
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