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A peptide library is a tool for protein-related study. A peptide library contains a great number of peptides that have a systematic combination of amino acids. Usually, the peptide library is synthesized on a solid phase, mostly on resin, which can be made as a flat surface or beads. The peptide library provides a powerful tool for drug design, protein–protein interactions, and other biochemical as well as pharmaceutical applications.
The synthetic peptide libraries are synthesized without utilizing phage or biological systems. Five or more subtypes of these libraries exist, and the distinguishing characteristic is the method of synthesis of each library. The subtypes are overlapping peptide libraries, truncation peptide libraries, random libraries, alanine scanning libraries, and positional or scrambled peptide libraries.
A mixture of desired amino acids can be created at each point in a sequence. In this way, a library of 20 different polypeptides can be created with only one amino acid residue at random and the rest being the same.
The usefulness of this form of peptide synthesis is limited as you cannot go beyond 70 amino acids in length. This would give you 20 possible combinations and that is only if you do not include the plethora of available amino acids with pre-installed post-translational modifications. Most drug development does not involve such a random assortment of proteins as you would not learn very much.