Editorial [Hot Topic: Screening for Proteins and Inhibitors (Guest Editor: Stefan Rose-John)]

High throughput screening approaches have found their way into many if not all pharmaceutical companies and have made important contributions to basic science as well as to drug development. An important aspect is that the combinatorial principle has not only been applied in molecular biology techniques, where randomized oligonucleotides have been incorporated into genes coding for phage and bacteria surface proteins. In the last ten years we have also seen fundamental progress in glycobiology, chemical protease inhibitor development and synthetic peptide library development. A further important point, which can be seen in nearly all reviews in this special issue, is the fundamental influence of structural biology. Most if not all biotechnological and therapeutic interventions at one point or the other rely on the interaction of drugs with proteins. Therefore, the availability of protein structural data is often pivotal to the understanding of the mechanism of action of a drug. Furthermore, many inhibitors of enzymes have been refined using structural data of their respective target proteins. The idea of this special issue was to assemble reviews of research fields which are strongly influenced by combinatorial approaches, although they would prima vista be judged to be scientifically unrelated. There are, however, many points where similar techniques were used or similar problems arose. The aim of this special issue has been to demonstrate the interdisciplinary aspect of combinatorial approaches. This special issue of Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening on the screening for proteins and inhibitors brings together leading scientists from diverse fields involved in protein and inhibitor research such as biochemistry, structural biology, signal transduction, combinatorial chemistry and recombinant antibody technology. This issue provides the reader with important breakthroughs of the last years and demonstrates that combinatorial approaches in chemistry and molecular biology are possible, necessary and successful.