Phage-display epitope library development for biomarkers identification in autoimmune diseases of the Central Nervous System

The principal aim of my PhD was the setting of a protocol for the creation of phage libraries to display cDNA fragments encoding real ORF sequences, that could correspond to potential epitopes. A similar phage display library contains all the potential ORF repertoire of a cell or tissue. This tool can be specially used in the study of autoimmune diseases to perform different kind of analysis, such as the identification of epitopes involved in pathological reaction, the comparison between healthy and pathological conditions, or between different pathological conditions. A complex protocol was developed. It provides for: cDNA normalization, cDNA fragmentation to obtain peptides with useful size, and ORF enrichment to obtain really coding fragments. With this system we have created a epitopes library from Human brain mRNA.