Engineering ligands for characterizing biomaterials using combinatorial phage display

PMSE 431

Marc D. Roy, Marc.Roy@nist.gov, Eric J. Amis, eric.amis@nist.gov, and Matthew L. Becker, matthew.becker@nist.gov. Polymers Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 100 Bureau Drive, Gaithersburg, MD 20899
Combinatorial phage display has emerged as a powerful method to design peptides capable of selective and enhanced binding affinity to various materials including inorganic nanocrystals. This approach offers significant advantages over de novo peptide design in the number of peptides that can be screened and the speed with which the evaluation of their affinity and specificity proceed. We have focused on and will describe recent efforts in which we have identified peptide sequences demonstrating enhanced and specific binding characteristics to crystalline inorganic substrates, such as hydroxyapatite and thin polymer films of degradable polymers.