Selection of viral epitopes from phage display libraries, application to diagnosis of equine arteritis virus.

Peptide libraries achieved on the surface of filamentous bacteriophages aim to discover among millions sequences those having affinity for one or few molecules. This technology has a lot of applications : drugs discovering ap plied to pharmaceutical medicine, sequences determination, epitope mapping, etc... Our purpose in this paper is to give a global idea on recombinant phage tec hnology potentialities. For this, we relate the main caracteristics and adv antages of this tool. Our review will be illustrated by the example of equi ne viral antigenic determinants selected from phage epitope library and inc orporated in diagnosis tests. The goal of these experiments was to select a mong fourty millions of recombinant phages those who had specific affinity for antibodies directed against equine arteritis virus. Once caracterised, these antigenic determinants were incorporated in ELISA tests. Utilization of ELISA tests, less expensive and quicker than classical serological tests , should replace them in the future. Another application of the displayed e pitope library could be the use of phages carrying an immunogen peptide as vaccines like it has been done for the gag gene of HIV and for the circumsp orozoite protein of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.