Restricted Diversity of Antigen Binding Residues of Antibodies Revealed by Computational Alanine Scanning of 227 Antibody–Antigen Complexes

Antibody molecules are able to recognize any antigen with high affinity and specificity. To get insight into the molecular diversity at the source of this functional diversity, we compiled and analyzed a non-redundant aligned collection of 227 structures of antibody–antigen complexes. Free energy of binding of all the residue side chains was quantified by computational alanine scanning, allowing the first large-scale quantitative description of...