Ribosome display is a powerful engineering research tool for the high-throughput selection of peptides or proteins, which results in the generation of high-performance binders against nearly any antigen of interest. As a cell-free display system, ribosome display has been well developed with many outstanding achievements for over 20 years. Compared with other related display techniques, ribosome display shows unique advantages and development prospects. This tool has been successfully exploited for the selection of functional and specific binders in vitro. This review provides a comprehensive survey of the applications of ribosome display in screening or evolving functional proteins as well as in diagnostics and therapeutics. Previous papers on ribosome display failed to comprehensively review evolutionary strategies for proteins. In the present paper, we review all existing evolutionary strategies that have been combined with ribosome display. We also discuss shortcomings, improvement strategies, and research tendency.
Keywords: Affinity maturation; Diagnostics; Display technologies; Evolutionary strategies; Ribosome display; Stability optimization; Therapeutics.