Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2008

Throughout its first ten years of publication, Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening has occupied a unique position among the peer reviewed literature by specializing in the publication of review articles and original research papers in combinatorial chemistry, high throughput screening, and the interface of these related fields. Papers published in CCHTS are highly visible and are abstracted and indexed by the Read More

High throughput screening (HTS) has become an indispensable tool in modern drug development and has been extended from the screening of chemical libraries to the screening of biological molecules or even whole organisms. Libraries of proteins and peptides can be screened for diverse applications including enzyme optimisation, functional genomics, or therapeutic purposes like drug development or targeted delivery. M Read More

High throughput screening is a core technology in drug discovery. During the past decade, several strategies have been developed to screen (poly)peptide libraries for diverse applications including disease diagnosis and profiling, imaging, as well as therapy. The recently established baculovirus display vector system (BDVS) represents a eukaryotic screening platform that combines the positive attributes of both cell a Read More

Retroviruses distinguish themselves from all other mammalian viruses by their abilities to infect and propagate in mammalian cells without causing a cytopathic effect and to stably integrate their genetic information into the genome of the host cell. These unique properties make them an ideal platform for the display and directed evolution of proteins in a mammalian cell environment. This review will describe the essentials abo Read More

Retroviral and lentiviral based gene delivery vectors have been used in numerous pre-clinical studies and clinical trials due to their advantages, including stable and prolonged expression of therapeutic transgenes and minimal immune responses against the vector. Despite such advantages, however, retroviral vectors also have several limitations for gene therapy applications. For example, they can suffer from a lack of effici Read More

After attracting the attention of the scientific community due to a number of favourable characteristics that make it an attractive vector for human gene therapy [1, 2], AAV has been thoroughly investigated in the past two decades. Standard technologies for the manipulation of the viral genome and for efficient packaging and purification protocols have paved the road for trial and error manipulation by educated guesses to study Read More

Yeast surface display has become an increasingly popular tool for protein engineering and library screening applications. Recent advances have greatly expanded the capability of yeast surface display, and are highlighted by cellbased selections, epitope mapping, cDNA library screening, and cell adhesion engineering. In this review, we discuss the state-of-the-art yeast display methodologies and the rapidly expanding set of ap Read More

Peptide aptamers are molecules that bind to protein targets and are able to interfere with their functions. In the past, important achievements have been made using such peptide aptamers in different approaches and for various purposes. Peptide aptamers are comprised of a variable peptide region of 8 to 20 amino acids in length, which is displayed by a scaffold protein. An overview of the numerous scaffold proteins t Read More

Artificial Transcription Factors (ATFs) are engineered DNA-binding proteins designed to bind specific sequences of DNA. ATFs made of Zinc Finger (ZF) domains have been developed to regulate specific genes and phenotypes both in cells and whole organisms. Recently, an emerging application of engineered DNA-binding domains include the specific editing of the genome, the ability to specifically cut, recombine, modify DNA an Read More

Reversely transfected cell microarrays (RTCM) have been introduced as a method for parallel high throughput analysis of gene functions in mammalian cells. Hundreds to thousands of different recombinant DNA or RNA molecules can be transfected into different cell clusters at the same time on a single glass slide with this method. This allows either the simultaneous overexpression or - by using the recently developed RN Read More

Christian Buchholz studied microbiology at the University of Munich. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in 1993, where he worked on the molecular mechanism of viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerases under supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Neubert. He then became a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Molecular Biology in Zurich where he elucidated the role of the measles virus receptor i Read More