Prof Ray Truant kindly shared his nanobody construct with us. This encodes a camelid derived Ig domain which binds huntingtin as he describes in this paper. This may be helpful in stabilizing our huntingtin protein samples to make it easier to work with in our structural experiments.

Our cloning team recloned the nanobody DNA sequences so that we can express the genes in E. coli and therefore express and purify the nanobodies in large quantities. In a test expression experiment where we try the purification in small scale, we were successful to this end with one of the constructs – hurrah! The purification was very clean so the protein is of high quality – now I need to scale it up and test binding to our recombinant huntingtin protein.