Encoded Self-Assembling Chemical Libraries

The display of chemical moieties at the extremity of synthetic oligonucleotides allows the self-assembly of large chemical libraries in which every chemical moiety is associated to a unique DNA sequence, serving as an 'identification bar code'. In this article, we describe the principles, the potential, and the challenges of this novel technology, which promises to facilitate the isolation of high-affinity binders to protein targets of biological and pharmaceutical interest.