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The last decades of technical development and availability of protein and peptide microarrays have enabled large-scale profiling of antibodies and precise determination of their specificities through epitope mapping. This has enabled characterization of the human immune response and the produced antibodies. Beside exploring the auto-antibody repertoire, this approach also identifies key autoantigens targeted by the antibodies in e.g. neurodegenerative disorders.

Arash Zandian defended his PhD-thesis "Array-based autoantibody profiling and epitope mapping" on October 6th where he presented the work he has performed during the last 4 years at SciLifeLab, School of Biotechnology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

The aim of this thesis was to use affinity proteomics tools to profile antibodies and determine their specificities. For this purpose blood-derived samples were analysed using microarray-based methods. These studies identified potential auto-antigens associated to different neurodegenerative disorders. Here described with articles in the field of narcolepsy (Häggmark-Månberg et al. 2015), multiple sclerosis (Zandian et al. 2017a), psycosis (Zandian et al. 2017b) and malaria (Ch'ng et al. 2017).

References

Häggmark-Måberg et al. 2015, Autoantibody targets in vaccine-associated narcolepsy, DOI: 10.1080/08916934.2016.1183655
Zandian et al. 2017a, Whole-Proteome Peptide Microarrays for Profiling AutoantibodyRepertoires within Multiple Sclerosis and Narcolepsy, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.6b00916
Zandian et al. 2017b, Untargeted screening for novel autoantibodies with prognostic value in first-episode psychosis, DOI:10.1038/tp.2017.160
Ch'ng et al. 2017, Epitopes of anti-RIFIN antibodies and characterization of rif-expressing Plasmodium falciparum parasites by RNA sequencing, DOI:10.1038/srep43190

Peter Nilsson