Generating Peptide Probes against Cancer-related Peptide Recognition Domains using Phage Display

Peptide recognition domains (PRD) bind to short linear motifs on their biological partners and are found in several cellular pathways including those found to be critical in tumorigenesis. In this study, I aimed to generate peptide probes against PRDs present on proteins involved in ovarian cancer. Using bioinformatics, I identified 66 potential PRDs present on these proteins. I then used peptide phage display to successfully generate peptides against 27 of the 66 domains. To validate my results, I performed an extensive literature review and structural analysis. For several cases, the phage-display derived binding preferences are similar to previously reported studies. However, for a subset of domains, I identified non-canonical binding preferences that have not been reported previously in literature. The binding preferences obtained in this study can be used to design intracellular probes for studying the role of these PRDs in biological pathways important in ovarian cancer.MAS