A library of organic landscapes on filamentous phage

A billion-clone library of filamentous phage with differentsurface structures (‘landscapes’) was generatedby fusing random octapeptides to the N-terminus of all 4000copies of the major coat protein. Such a ‘landscape library’might include clones exhibiting emergent properties that inherein the entire surface architecture, not in the peptides by themselves.Because the diverse surface landscapes are displayed on viablephage, they can be surveyed for exceedingly rare functions usingmicrobiological selection methods. Clones with several emergentproperties of the sort envisioned were successfully selected,suggesting that landscape libraries have promise as a novelsource of nanomaterials with exploitable surface properties.