Applications of the phage display technology in molecular biology, biotechnology and medicine

Abstract

The phage display technology is based on the presentation of peptide sequences on the surface of virions of bacteriophages. Its development led to creation of sophisticated systems based on the possibility of the presentation of a huge variability of peptides, attached to one of proteins of bacteriophage capsids. The use of such systems allowed for achieving enormous advantages in the processes of selection of bioactive molecules. In fact, the phage display technology has been employed in numerous fields of biotechnology, as diverse as immunological and biomedical applications (in both diagnostics and therapy), the formation of novel materials, and many others. In this paper, contrary to many other review articles which were focussed on either specific display systems or the use of phage display in selected fields, we present a comprehensive overview of various possibilities of applications of this technology. We discuss an usefulness of the phage display technology in various fields of science, medicine and the broad sense of biotechnology. This overview indicates the spread and importance of applications of microbial systems (exemplified by the phage display technology), pointing to the possibility of developing such sophisticated tools when advanced molecular methods are used in microbiological studies, accompanied with understanding of details of structures and functions of microbial entities (bacteriophages in this case).

Keywords:

• Phage display
• biotechnological applications
• diagnostic methods
• drug development
• novel biomaterials

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Agnieszka Żylicz-Stachula, Sylwia Rodziewicz-Motowidło, Pawał Sachadyn, Piotr Mucha, Michał Pikuła, and Arkadiusz Piotrowski for inspiratory discussions. All figures were created using BioRender.com.

Authors’ contributions

K.P. drafted the chapter on phage display in medicine. J.M.-O. drafted the chapter on phage display in biotechnology, and prepared the figures. L.G. drafted the chapter on phage display in molecular biology. W.J. revised the manuscript. P.M.S. led and supervised the project. G.W. drafted introduction and concluding remarks, supervised the work on the manuscript and prepared the final version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Centre for Research and Development (Poland) [project grant no. TECHMATSTRATEG2/410747/11/NCBR/2019].