Proof-of-concept glycoengineering of gp120 antigens to selectively enhance antigenicity.

(a) Cartoon depicts the overall de novo antigen optimization design approach. (b) The heat maps, as in Fig 3E, depict the glycosylation site determinant profiles preferred by PGT121 and PGT128 including directional glycan coloring across all N-glycan sites (columns). (c) The top heat map represents the original wild-type MG535.W0M.ENV.D11 gp120 sequon site profile (yellow = sequon site absent and black = sequon site present); middle and bottom heat maps indicated the introduced point mutations (brown = sequon site knock-in, light blue = sequon site knock-out) for the gp120s engineered to have increased binding to PGT121 (+PGT121), PGT128 (+PGT128), and both PGT121 and PGT128 (+PGT121+PGT128); also, the gp120s engineered to selectively bind PGT121 but not PGT128 (+PGT121-PGT128), or PGT128 but not PGT121 (-PGT121+PGT128 and -PGT121+PGT128 2nd). (d) The bar graph depicts comparison of the predicted binding (beige = PGT121 and brown = PGT128) and ELISA-determined binding (light blue = PGT121, dark blue = PGT128, and grey = VRC01 binding) to the wildtype and engineered gp120s. ELISA binding activity was determined as in Fig 2A. In order to compare the model predictions to the experimental results, both the model and actual ELISA values were normalized to wild-type binding values, which were set to 1. Error bars indicate the standard deviation from six replicates. (e) The bar graph shows the degree of steric hindrance found on each antigen by summing all steric glycan site pairs (Figure J in S1 File), if any site in the pair was considered essential for predicting Ab binding. Pink highlighted region denotes the average and range of the degree of steric hindrance across all the 94 recombinant gp120 proteins.