Nicola Pontillo

Phage display to develop novel antimicrobials

Phage display is a molecular biology technology invented by George P. Smith in 1985 and was subsequently developed in the 90s by several research groups in order to select antibodies, therapeutic proteins and in general as support methodology for protein engineering. This technique is applied for the irrational design of peptide binders and it serves the purpose of obtaining peptides or proteins with particular characteristics using evolution as a unique tool for their selection. At the head of a bacteriophage, a library of peptides will be generated that will be panned against target proteins (Figure 2). In the Alert program, it will be exploited for the selection of strong peptide binders against novel targets in bacteria.

Department: RUG
Principal investigator(s): Andreas Herrmann

ESR3.4 Nicola Pontillo
ESR3.4 Nicola Pontillo

Publications

Ma, C., Dong, J., Viviani, M., Tulini, I., Pontillo, N., Maity, S., Zhou, Y., Roos, W. H., Liu, K., Herrmann, A., & Portale, G. (2020). De novo rational design of a freestanding, supercharged polypeptide, proton-conducting membrane. Science Advances, 6(29), eabc0810. https://doi.org/doi:10.1126/sciadv.abc0810