Ideal‐Filter Capillary Electrophoresis (IFCE) Facilitates the One‐Step Selection of Aptamers.

Selection of aptamers from oligonucleotide libraries currently requires multiple rounds of alternating steps of partitioning of binders from nonbinders and enzymatic amplification of all collected oligonucleotides. Herein, we report a highly practical solution for reliable one‐step selection of aptamers. We introduce partitioning by ideal‐filter capillary electrophoresis (IFCE) in which binders and nonbinders move in the opposite directions. The efficiency of IFCE‐based partitioning reaches 109, which is ten million times higher than that of typical solid‐phase partitioning methods. One step of IFCE‐based partitioning is sufficient for the selection of a high‐affinity aptamer pool for a protein target. Partitioning by IFCE promises to become an indispensable tool for fast and robust selection of binders from different types of oligonucleotide libraries. A good selection: Ideal‐filter capillary electrophoresis (IFCE) is introduced to facilitate the reliable and practical one‐step selection of oligonucleotide aptamers for protein targets. IFCE will also be applicable to the selection of binders from DNA‐encoded libraries of small molecules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]