Multipin technology in the preparation and screening of peptide libraries

Peptide libraries are relatively new sources of enormous numbers of unique compounds, fodder for the mill of drug discovery programs. Their enormous diversity derives from vast numbers of combinations of a small number of monomers (Geysen et al., 1986). For example, a complete hexapeptide library synthesized from just 10 monomers (amino acids) has one million unique compounds in it. In principle, other types of combinatorial libraries can have equally vast numbers of members; for example, the monomers can be N-acyl glycines, giving rise to the so-called "peptoids" (Simon et al., 1992); or the monomers could be monosaccharides or nucleotides.