AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Biomaterial Interfaces Wednesday Sessions
       Session BI1-WeA

Paper BI1-WeA2
The Application of Magnetic Tweezers to High Throughput Screening of Peptide Libraries

Wednesday, November 2, 2005, 2:20 pm, Room 311

Session: Protein-Surface Interactions
Presenter: H. Shang, Purdue University
Authors: H. Shang, Purdue University
G.U. Lee, Purdue University
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Single molecule force measurement techniques, such as, the atomic force microscope (AFM), have provided us with the ability to directly measuring the force and displacement involved in the rupture single ligand-receptor interactions. These techniques are providing us with fundamentally new information about molecular recognition interactions, which potentially is extremely useful for designing ligands for specific receptors. Magnetic tweezers is a technique in which micron size paramagnetic particles are used to transduce pico-newton scale force to single ligand-receptor pairs. This technique has the force resolution of a single hydrogen bond and allows millions of ligand-receptor pairs to be simultaneously screened. A kinetic model is used to analyze the data and the binding affinities of different ligand-receptor pairs are revealed by statistical analysis. The advantage of using this technique over conventional assays is that force can be used to define the affinity of the bond. In this presentation, we review recent single molecule force measurements with AFM and advances that have been made in screen phage libraries using magnetic tweezers.