The Ties That Bind: Peptide Display Technology

Date: March 15, 1999 Phage Display Systems and Vectors Structure of the T7 phage particle. The negative-stained pattern from polyheads showing capsid hexamer and pentamer units has been fitted onto the surface of the icosahedral particle. A single monomer of the capsid protein is shaded in red. Figure provided by Novagen. Back in the early '50s, at a time when Elvis Presley was beginning his undisputed reign as the king of rock 'n' roll, bacteriophage were rearing their ugly heads (so to speak) to take center stage as the rising stars of molecular biology. Isolation of these parasitic bacterial viruses prompted much interest in the study of their astonishing growth cycles, but early experiments provided little insight as to whether the nucleic acid or a protein component of the viral coat carried the genetic specificity in progeny production. In 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase, while working with 32P-labeled bacteriophage ...