Developing New Tools for the in vivo Generation/Screening of Cyclic Peptide Libraries. A New Combinatorial Approach for the Detection of Bacterial Toxin Inhibitors

A new combinatorial approach for the biosynthesis and screening of small drug-like toxin inhibitors inside living cells is presented. This approach has been initially used as proof of principle for finding inhibitors against the LF factor from Bacillus anthracis. Key to our ''living combinatorial'' approach is the use of a living cell as a micro-chemical factory for both synthesis and screening of potential inhibitors for a given molecular recognition event (see Scheme 1). This powerful technique posses the advantage that both processes synthesis and screening happen inside the cell thus accelerating the whole screening/selection process