Phage display for target-based antibacterial drug discovery

Increasing bacterial drug resistance and hard-to-eradicate opportunistic in fections have created a need for new antibiotics. Sequencing of microbial g enomes has yielded many new potential targets for antibacterial drug discov ery. However, little is known about the biochemical activities of many of t hese targets, making it difficult to develop HTS assays for them. Peptides isolated by phage display can be used as 'surrogate ligands' in competition assays for screening of targets of unknown function with small-molecule li braries. These screening assays can be adapted into a variety of high-throu ghput formats, including those based on radioactive, luminescence or fluore scence detection.