Antibodies against multiple post-translationally modified proteins aid in diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis and associate with complete biochemical response to treatment.

Background: (Auto)immune mediated and cholestatic liver disease (AILD) includes autoimmune hepatitis (AIH), primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) and primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). Especially AIH is characterized by the presence of autoantibodies and elevated serum immunoglobulins. In rheumatoid arthritis, autoantibodies against post-translational modifications (PTMs) such as citrullination (Cit) and carbamylation (CarP) are used as diagnostic and prognostic markers, respectively. We studied the presence of six anti-PTM antibodies in patients with the three AILDs and non-AILD. Methods: Antibodies against six PTMs (malondialdehyde-acetaldehyde adducts (MAA), advanced glycation end-products (AGE), CarP, acetylation (AL), Cit, and nitration (NT)) were tested in sera of patients with AILD (n = 106), non-AILD (n = 101) and compared with healthy controls (HC) (n = 100). Levels and positivity were correlated with clinical and biochemical features in a well-defined cohort of untreated AIH patients. Results: Anti-PTM antibodies were more often detectable in sera from AILD patients compared with HCs (anti-MAA: 67.9% vs. 2.0%, anti-AGE: 36.8% vs. 4.0%, anti-CarP: 47.2% vs. 5.0% and anti-AL: 18.9% vs. 5.0%). In untreated AIH, time to complete biochemical response (CBR) was associated with anti-MAA, anti-AGE, anti-CarP and anti-AL antibodies. Significantly more patients with at least three anti-PTM antibodies attained CBR at 12 months of treatment (13 vs. 3 p = 0.01). Conclusion: Anti-PTM antibodies are frequently present in AILD. The presence of anti-MAA, anti-AGE and anti-CarP antibodies correlates with the presence of AIH within this cohort. In AIH, harboring at least three anti-PTM antibody responses is positively associated with CBR. Determination of anti-PTM antibodies in liver disease may have diagnostic and prognostic value.

Solid colloids with surface-mobile linkers.

In this report we review the possibilities of using colloids with surface mobile linkers for the study of colloidal self-assembly processes. A promising route to create systems with mobile linkers is the use of lipid (bi-)layers. These lipid layers can be either used in the form of vesicles or as coatings for hard colloids and emulsion droplets. Inside the lipid bilayers molecules can be inserted via membrane anchors. Due to the fluidity of the lipid bilayer, the anchored molecules remain mobile. The use of different lipid mixtures even allows creating Janus-like particles that exhibit directional bonding if linkers are used which have a preference for a certain lipid phase. In nature mobile linkers can be found e.g. as receptors in cells. Therefore, towards the end of the review, we also briefly address the possibility of using colloids with surface mobile linkers as model systems to mimic cell-cell interactions and cell adhesion processes.

Quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring and spectroscopic ellipsometry measurements of the phospholipid bilayer anchoring stability and kinetics of hydrophobically modified DNA oligonucleotides.

Decorating lipid bilayers with oligonucleotides has great potential for both fundamental studies and applications, taking advantage of the membrane properties and the specific Watson-Crick base pairing. Here, we systematically studied the binding of DNA oligonucleotides with the frequently used hydrophobic anchors cholesterol, stearyl, and distearyl to supported lipid bilayers made of dioleoylphosphatidylcholine (DOPC) by quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring and spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE). All three anchors were found to incorporate well into DOPC lipid membranes, yet only the distearyl-based anchor remained stable in the bilayer when it was rinsed. The unstable anchoring of the cholesterol- and stearyl-based oligonucleotides can, however, be stabilized by hybridization of the oligonucleotides to complementary DNA modified with a second hydrophobic anchor of the same type. In all cases, the incorporation into the lipid bilayer was found to be limited by mass transport, although micelle formation likely reduced the effective concentration of available oligonucleotides in some samples, leading to substantial differences in binding rates. Using a viscoelastic model to determine the thickness of the DNA layer and elucidating the surface coverage by SE, we found that at equal bulk concentrations double-stranded DNA constructs attached to the lipid bilayer establish a layer that is thicker than that of single-stranded oligonucleotides, whereas the DNA surface densities are similar. Shortening the length of the oligonucleotides, on the other hand, does alter both the thickness and surface density of the DNA layer. This indicates that at the bulk oligonucleotide concentrations employed in our experiments, the packing of the oligonucleotides is not affected by the anchor type, but rather by the length of the DNA. The results are useful for material and biomedical applications that require efficient linking of oligonucleotides to lipid membranes.

Solid colloids with surface-mobile DNA linkers.

Surface functionalization with bioinspired binding groups is increasingly used to steer nano- and microscale self-assembly processes, with complementary DNA "sticky ends" as one of the most notable examples. The fabrication of well-organized structures is complicated, however, by the sharp association/dissociation transitions and the slow rearrangement kinetics intrinsic to collections of discrete, surface-immobilized binding groups and is aggravated by natural nonuniformities in the surface coating. Here, we demonstrate a novel system of solid microparticles functionalized with specific binding groups-in this case DNA linkers-that are fully mobile along the particle surface. These colloids display qualitatively new behavior and circumvent many of the commonly encountered issues. Importantly, the association/dissociation transition, and thereby the temperature window for equilibrium self-assembly, is much broader. We further find that the linkers are uniformly distributed above the DNA melting temperature, while visibly accumulating at the interparticle contacts below this temperature. The unique combination of binding group mobility with nondeformability, monodispersity, and facile manipulation of solid particles should have a profound impact on DNA-mediated and other bioinspired self-assembly approaches. Moreover, our highly tunable experimental system enables detailed model investigations that will also deepen our fundamental understanding of other systems with surface-mobile binding groups, for instance, biological ligand-receptor interactions.

Multiple actin binding domains of Ena/VASP proteins determine actin network stiffening.

Vasodilator-stimulated phosphoprotein (Ena/VASP) is an actin binding protein, important for actin dynamics in motile cells and developing organisms. Though VASP's main activity is the promotion of barbed end growth, it has an F-actin binding site and can form tetramers, and so could additionally play a role in actin crosslinking and bundling in the cell. To test this activity, we performed rheology of reconstituted actin networks in the presence of wild-type VASP or mutants lacking the ability to tetramerize or to bind G-actin and/or F-actin. We show that increasing amounts of wild-type VASP increase network stiffness up to a certain point, beyond which stiffness actually decreases with increasing VASP concentration. The maximum stiffness is 10-fold higher than for pure actin networks. Confocal microscopy shows that VASP forms clustered actin filament bundles, explaining the reduction in network elasticity at high VASP concentration. Removal of the tetramerization site results in significantly reduced bundling and bundle clustering, indicating that VASP's flexible tetrameric structure causes clustering. Removing either the F-actin or the G-actin binding site diminishes VASP's effect on elasticity, but does not eliminate it. Mutating the F-actin and G-actin binding site together, or mutating the F-actin binding site and saturating the G-actin binding site with monomeric actin, eliminates VASP's ability to increase network stiffness. We propose that, in the cell, VASP crosslinking confers only moderate increases in linear network elasticity, and unlike other crosslinkers, VASP's network stiffening activity may be tuned by the local concentration of monomeric actin.