Development of high affinity broadly reactive aptamers for spike protein of multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants

Thao T Le; Donald J Benton; Antoni G Wrobel; Steven J Gamblin

doi:10.1039/d3ra01382k

Development of high affinity broadly reactive aptamers for spike protein of multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants

RSC Adv. 2023 May 19;13(22):15322-15326. doi: 10.1039/d3ra01382k. eCollection 2023 May 15.

Authors

Thao T Le¹, Donald J Benton², Antoni G Wrobel², Steven J Gamblin²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London UK vtntle@gmail.com.
² Structural Biology of Disease Processes Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute UK Donald.Benton@crick.ac.uk.

Abstract

We have developed broadly reactive aptamers against multiple variants by alternating the target between spike proteins from different SARS-CoV-2 variants during the selection process. In this process we have developed aptamers which can recognise all variants, from the original wild-type 'Wuhan' strain to Omicron, with high affinity (K_d values in the pM range).