Peptide display in functional genomics

The completion of the human genome project has opened novel scientific aven ues in functional genomics, structural genomics and proteomics. These areas have a common goal: the identification of all the proteins acting and cros s-talking in a single cell at a defined moment of its lifecycle. The expans ion of these areas in bioscience has been facilitated by the rapid developm ent of high throughput screening (HTS) methods which has, in turn, attracte d the business community to make investments in this novel business segment of biotechnology. By using these HTS methods, the hope is that novel targe ts will be validated much more rapidly speeding up the development of novel drugs. Numerous techniques and tools have emerged over the past decade for the identification of small target-specific molecular ligands that exploit a common feature: the exploration of molecular diversity using combination al methods. While chemists developed new methods for rapidly and efficientl y synthesising and screening large collections of small molecules, biologis ts used recombinant DNA techniques for selecting displayed repertoires. To this end, the discovery of new low molecular weight peptides is becoming in creasingly important, not only as molecular tools for the understanding of protein-protein interactions but also for the generation of lead compounds.