Bio-Fishing allows searching a large collection of peptides or proteins to rapidly and effectively identify sequences binding to a precise target. In Bio-Fishing, a target molecule is anchored onto a solid surface while a large library of diverse peptides is allowed to interact with the target. Non-binding peptides are washed out, whereas binding ones are selectively retained onto the surface and subsequently recovered by elution.

Peptide sequences are individually displayed on the surface of bacteriophage which provides a physical linkage between the displayed peptide and the corresponding encoding sequence, a technique known as phage display.

This unique link allows the amplification of binding sequences following the elution step and their use for the next round of selection. By means of this iterative selection-amplification cycle, the initial peptide population is enriched of those sequences selectively binding to the target molecule.

Finally, the binding peptides’ sequences are deduced by sequencing their corresponding DNA.

Explora has developed proprietary phage libraries specifically designed to identify peptide sequences binding to:

• small molecular weight compounds
• proteins and proteins complexes
• double or single stranded DNA and RNA