PEPSEQ TECHNOLOGY

PEPSEQ TECHNOLOGY

Subject: Science & tech

Context : The results of a new study suggest that the immune systems of people infected with Covid-19 may rely on antibodies created during infections from earlier coronaviruses (other than SARS-CoV-2) to help fight the disease.

Concept:

• The study sought to understand how coronaviruses ignite the human immune system and conduct a deeper dive on the inner workings of the antibody response.
• The researchers used a tool called PepSeq to finely map antibody responses to all human-infecting coronaviruses. .
• Besides SARS-CoV-2, researchers examined the antibody responses from two other potentially deadly coronaviruses: MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-1.

PepSeq Technology

• Molecules that bind to critical targets (organisms, proteins, toxins, or other biological molecules) have great potential as diagnostic/detection tools and also as potential therapeutic drugs.
• For detection/diagnostics, the current standard is antibodies that are produced in rodents or with phage display technologies. This is labor intensive and lacks in cost and time effectiveness.
• This technology relates to a method for identifying synthetic molecular binding agents from peptide libraries using the PepSeq technology.
• This method uses large libraries of peptides tagged with DNA sequences to precisely identify particular peptides.
• Target molecules (e.g., proteins, toxins, enzymes, pathogens, biomarkers) are incubated with the libraries to identify specific peptides that bind to the targets.