Identification of candidate vaccine genes using ribosome display

In vitro protein selection methods that are not biased by the context of living organisms allow the screening of genomic expression libraries against a large number of different ligands. As such, ribosome display is a powerful technology for the in vitro selection of proteins or peptides from large PCR-derived libraries. Libraries can be generated from the genomic fragments of pathogens, thus allowing potential vaccine genes and the immunologically relevant proteins of pathogens to be identified and mapped using ribosome display. This chapter describes a methodology for the use of ribosome display for the identification of potential vaccine genes for the bacterial pathogen APP-5.