D Wilson, Anthony Keefe, and Jack Szostak have made a wonderful contribution to the changing world of peptide and protein in vitro evolution and selection. In a previous issue of PNAS (1), they demonstrated that the expected (and observed) weak affinities of peptides (from, for example, bead or phage display) can be enhanced by using ‘‘mRNA display.’’ The present work is a large step forward. T...

Bladder cancer is common and widespread, and its incidence is increasing. Many new diagnostic methods combined with state-of-the-art technology have been introduced in cystoscopy to collect real-time images of the bladder mucosa for diagnosis, but often miss inconspicuous early-stage tumors. Fluorophore-labeled peptides with high sensitivity and specificity for cancer would be a desirable tool ...

Proteolytic degradation of the basement membrane by the matrix metalloproteinase-2 and -9 is an essential step in tumor angiogenesis. On proteolytic degradation, cryptic sites in collagen IV are formed, which serve as a migration signal for endothelial cells and are specific for angiogenic blood vessels. The aim of this study was to generate peptides that bind specifically to proteolytically pr...

Random heptapeptide library displayed by bacteriophage T7 was used to characterize epitopes of five monoclonal antibodies that were specific to L. australis, L. bangkok, and L. bratislava. Phages selected by biopanning were cloned by plaque isolation, and the binding specificity of individual clones was confirmed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, before being further amplified and checked f...

BACKGROUND Quantitative immunohistochemical (IHC) assays currently lack optimal reference quality-control material for cellular protein targets. To address this problem, we identified peptides that mimic the site on the native analyte to which the primary (monoclonal) antibody binds and used them as surrogate peptide controls. METHODS We identified peptide candidates from a combinatorial pept...

A novel phagemid vector, named pCM, was optimized for the cloning and display of antibody fragment (Fab) libraries on the surface of filamentous phage. This vector contains two long DNA "stuffer" fragments for easier differentiation of the correctly cut forms of the vector. Moreover, in pCM the fragment at the heavy-chain cloning site contains an acid phosphatase-encoding gene allowing an easy ...

The amplification of phage-displayed libraries is an essential step in the selection of ligands from these libraries. The amplification of libraries, however, decreases their diversity and limits the number of binding clones that a screen can identify. While this decrease might not be a problem for screens against targets with a single binding site (e.g., proteins), it can severely hinder the i...

Identification of Polystyrene (PS)-Binding Sequences Polymer-binding sequences were identified using a phage display library developed from phage type M13. The library displayed random peptide sequences on its pIII coat proteins of the format X6YX6 or X6PX6, where X represents one of the twenty naturally occurring amino acids. For the panning procedure, wells of a native polystyrene plate (CoSt...

There is an ever-increasing demand to select specific, high-affinity binding molecules against targets of biomedical interest. The success of such selections depends strongly on the design and functional diversity of the library of binding molecules employed, and on the performance of the selection strategy. We recently developed SRP phage display that employs the cotranslational signal recogni...