Phage selection strategies for improved afinity and speciicity of proteins and peptides

Abstract Filamentous phage display of peptide or protein variants has been widely used for rapid selection of protein variants that bind with improved affinity and improved specificity to a target molecule (for reviews, see 1, 2). The key feature of such selection schemes is that the genotype of a particular variant is linked through packaging inside a virion particle to the phenotype of a displayed protein or peptide that has been fused to one of the coat proteins, such as gene III protein (pIII), of the phage. Phage particles can be selected by binding to an affinity matrix, propagated in Escherichia coli , and identified by DNA sequencing ( Figure 1 ).