Evolution of Cell-Type-Specific RNA Aptamers Via Live Cell-Based SELEX.

Live cell-based SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligand EXponential enrichment) is a promising approach for identifying aptamers that can selectively bind to a cell-surface antigen or a particular target cell population. In particular, it offers a facile selection strategy for some special cell-surface proteins that are original glycosylated or heavily post-translationally modified, and are unavailable in their native/active conformation after in vitro expression and purification. In this chapter, we describe evolution of cell-type-specific RNA aptamers targeting the human CCR5 by combining the live cell-based SELEX strategy with high-throughput sequencing (HTS) and bioinformatics analysis.