Generation of highly diverse peptide library by linear-double-stranded DNA based AND gate genetic circuit in mammalian cells

Display technologies, e.g., phage, ribosome, mRNA, bacterial, and yeast-display, combine high content peptide libraries with appropriate screening strategies to identify functional peptide sequences. Construction of large peptide library and display-screen system in intact mammalian cells will facilitate the development of peptide therapeutics targeting transmembrane proteins. Our previous work established linear-double-stranded DNAs (ldsDNAs) as innovative biological parts to implement AND gate genetic circuits in mammalian cell line. In the current study, we employ ldsDNA with terminal NNK degenerate codons as AND gate input to build highly diverse peptide library in mammalian cells. Only PCR reaction and cell transfection experiments are needed to construct the library. High-throughput sequencing (HTS) results reveal that our new strategy could generate peptide library with both amino acid sequence and peptide length diversities. Our work establishes ldsDNA as biological parts for building highly diverse peptide library in mammalian cells, which shows great application potential in developing therapeutic peptides targeting transmembrane proteins. Overall design: We apply ldsDNA-based AND gate calculation to generate highly diverse peptide library in mammalian cells; Six different combinations of these two subgroup ldsDNAs were introduced into HEK293T cells to construct the AND-gate genetic circuits.