cover illustration Antibody single-chain fragment stability-engineered by point mutantions (A) and by a CDR-graft to the most stable human consensus framework (B). Insufficient thermodynamic stability can limit the use of particular antibody fragments as targeting moieties in therapeutic constructs, such as e.g. immunotoxins or immunoliposomes. This limitation can be overcome by a graft of the antigen combining site to a more stable antibody framework. However, such grafts sometimes fail to reach the superior stability of the acceptor framework. Comparison with the stabilization obtained with a set of designed point mutations shows that this is not always due to destabilizing interactions within the complementary determining regions, but to subtle structural differences between different classes of antibody frameworks that introduce strain in CDR grafts to divergent frameworks. For further details please see Kügler et al. (pp. 135-148) and Honegger et al. (pp. 121-134).