The basic structure of filamentous phage and its use in the display of combinatorial peptide libraries

Combinatorial peptide libraries have been playing a major role in the search for new drugs, ligands, enzyme substrates, and other specifically interacting molecules. The principal features of these libraries require a versatile repertoire, an easily identifiable tag for each of the library members, a simple method of synthesis, and a compatibility with the biochemical milieu. Two types of combinatorial libraries are in use: synthetic libraries and biological (mainly phage display) ones. An advantage of the biological libraries is due to the ability of each of the library members to replicate itself and to the fact that they carry their own coding sequences. The uniqueness of filamentous phage is that of its five virion proteins, three can tolerate the insertion of foreign peptides, each in a distinctive manner. The major coat protein, pVIII, is capable of displaying hundreds of peptide copies over the phage virion, pIII can display either one or five copies, and pVI, as opposed to the first two, displays its peptides such that the carboxy terminus is oriented outward. A major drawback of filamentous phage is its size. The length of an intact phage particle is 930 nm and it contains an ssDNA of 6400 bp. 2800 copies of the major coat protein form a "fish scale" cover over most of the virion DNA, whereas five copies of pIII, which has been the major protein used for library display, and five copies of pVI are located at one end of the filamentous virion. There is no doubt that in order to improve the quality of filamentous phage libraries, the size of phage should be drastically reduced. Comprehensive research on the phage life cycle and its structure will lead us to the construction of miniature phage and to other methods that will enable an in vivo expanding of the library repertoire as well as to binding-induced specific clone-proliferation.