Peptide display on filamentous phage capsids An new powerful tool to study protein—ligand interaction

Peptides can be displayed on the surface of filamentous bacteriophages by fusion to phage coat proteins. It was recently shown that vast (10(8)) collections of phages, each exposing a variant of the original peptide, can be constructed and utilized as a general source of peptide ligands. By panning these libraries on a target molecule linked to a solid support it is possible to select, out of the hundreds of millions of clones, those few phages that display a peptide that binds the target molecule. Searching these libraries is a powerful tool to be applied in many areas of fundamental and applied biology.