Development and Application of Computational Methods in Phage Display Technology

Background: Phage display is a powerful and versatile technology for the identification of peptide ligands binding to multiple targets, which has been successfully employed in various fields, such as diagnostics and therapeutics, drug-delivery and material science. The integration of next generation sequencing technology with phage display makes this methodology more productive. With the widespread use of this technique and the fast accumulation of phage display data, databases for these data and computational methods have become an indispensable part in this community. This review aims to summarize and discuss recent progress in the development and application of computational methods in the field of phage display. Methods: We undertook a comprehensive search of bioinformatics resources and computational methods for phage display data via Google Scholar and PubMed. The methods and tools were further divided into different categories according to their uses. Results: We described seven special or relevant databases for phage display data, which provided an evidence-based source for phage display researchers to clean their biopanning results. These databases can identify and report possible target-unrelated peptides (TUPs), thereby excluding false-positive data from peptides obtained from phage display screening experiments. More than 20 computational methods for analyzing biopanning data were also reviewed. These methods were classified into computational methods for reporting TUPs, for predicting epitopes and for analyzing next generation phage display data. Conclusion: The current bioinformatics archives, methods and tools reviewed here have benefitted the biopanning community. To develop better or new computational tools, some promising directions are also discussed.