Peptides Arrays
Pepscan was one of the inventors of the combinatorial synthesis approach to generate large ensembles of overlapping peptides. The technology has been optimized over the years into a peptide array technology that allows high throughput (parallel) synthesis and screening of whole libraries of peptides (10,000-100,000). Main strength of the technology is the possibility to control diversity in a highly systematic manner: the identity and location of each peptide is known at any given time during the whole process (“spatially addressable synthesis”). In addition, the use of non-natural amino acids in these arrays further extends the horizon for exploring new NCE’s beyond the reach of phage-display type libraries that solely rely on the use of natural amino acids.
The peptide arrays technology is exceptional for its high sensitivity which allows to “pick-up” highly specific interactions that are usually too weak to be detectable in a standard ELISA-format.
The combination of the CLIPS and peptide array technology is particularly powerful as it allows high throughput screening of a ‘controlled’ diversity of not only linear, but more importantly also cyclic, bicyclic, and multi-looped peptides, in combination with systematic variation of amino acids (both D- and L- isomers), loopsize, etc. This has opened the possibility to use conformationally constrained peptides in high throughput fashion for various applications, such as peptide drug discovery and epitope mapping.