Phage Display Derived Short Peptides for the Recovery of Valuable Metal Ions from Water Streams

Since several years, the phage surface display technique (PSD) has been successfully applied for the development of new receptor-ligand pairs for medical purposes, new pharmaceuticals or the elucidation of protein-protein interactions [1,2]. A comparatively new methodological approach is the use of this technique for bioremediation [3,4]. We established the PSD as novel biotechnological platform for the selective recovery of industrial relevant elements either in ionic form or as small particles. The commercially available bacteriophage libraries Ph.D.C7C and Ph.D.12 (New England Biolabs, Inc.) were used for isolation and identification of specific nickel, cobalt and gallium ion binding peptides. From a pool of 1,2 x 10⁹ different peptide motifs, 24 phage clones for nickel, 20 for cobalt and 108 for gallium were isolated in the iterative bio-panning process. The binding strength of these phages clones was compared with the one of unmodified wild type phages by performing adsorption tests onto metal loaded agarose beads. Cross binding tests revealed for most of the nickel binding phages also binding capacities for cobalt and vice versa.

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