Progress in Aptamer Screening Methods

Aptamer (oligonucleotide) with specific binding capacity for target could be obtained via a screening technique called SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment). With the development of them for about two decades, aptamers, as an alternative to antibodies, has shown bright prospects in scientific research, clinical diagnosis, and therapy. As the screening technique is the key to getting an aptamer successfully, new approaches and methods such as subtractive SELEX, complex targets SELEX, genomic SELEX, CE SELEX have appeared continually to improve the screening efficiency in recent years. These methods are reviewed in this article.