Yeast Display (also called Yeast Surface Display, YSD) is a protein engineering and screening technology that presents peptides or proteins on the outside surface of yeast cells, effectively turning each yeast cell into a “living bead” that physically links a displayed molecule (phenotype) to its encoding DNA inside the cell (genotype). This makes it especially powerful for building and screening peptide libraries to discover binders, optimize affinity, and study molecular interactions. 1) What “Yeast Display” Means in Practice In yeast display, researchers genetically fuse a peptide (or protein) to a yeast surface-anchor system so that the peptide is exported through the secretory pathway and tethered to the cell wall. A classic and widely used anchoring strategy in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the Aga1p–Aga2p system, where a fusion partner (often Aga2p) helps attach the displayed peptide to the cell surface, while the encoding plasmid remains inside the same cell. This one-cell-one-variant format is what makes library screening so efficient. 2) Why Yeast Is a Strong Host for Display Libraries Yeast is a eukaryote, so it can support more complex folding and quality control than many prokaryotic systems. For many peptide/protein scaffolds, this can translate into improved display of properly folded…
