Abstract: In this work, an anti-deoxynivalenol nanobody isolated from a naive phage display library was adopted to investigate the relationship between bioactivity and the composition of amino acid residues using error prone polymerase chain reaction (epPCR) and phage display. The epPCR was firstly optimized to produce a phage display library with balanced distribution of mutation. After six rounds of panning of the mutant library, 30 out of 96 picked clones exhibited 8 different mutations, whose signal was 2.1 folds higher than that of the wild-type clone. Multi-sequence alignment analysis showed that mutant sites were prone to be found in the junction region between complementarity determining regions (CDRs) and framework regions (FRs). Three-dimensional structure modeling results indicated that some mutants were capable of forming an intramolecular disulphide bond, which benefits to stabilize the molecular structure. These data can provide a clue for further mutation and modification of anti-deoxynivalenol nanobody and also provide a guideline for the design of nanobody recognizing other low molecular weight compounds.

Key words: nanobody, deoxynivalenol, error prone PCR, phage display