Direct Selection of cDNAs from Filamentous Phage Surface Display Libraries: An Update

Abstract

Since the first description of phage surface display in 1985, more than 2500 publications report the use of this technology in different fields of life science. Phage display is based on presenting recombinant proteins or peptides fused to a phage coat protein by using appropriately designed phage surface-display vectors in combination with in vitro selection procedures. These technologies have now revolutionized the way in which we can generate and manipulate ligands. The ability to create and survey large molecular libraries for the presence of specific clones using the discriminative power of affinity selection has strongly contributed to a rapid progress in life science. However, the potential of phage display applications to directly select genes from phage surface-displayed cDNA libraries has lagged behind the impressive progress of phage display technology achieved during the last years. Here we present an update of our earlier review (1) devoted to this promising field of research.