Library (biology)

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In molecular biology, a library is a collection of molecules in a stable form that represents some aspect of an organism. Two common types of libraries are cDNA libraries (formed from Complementary DNA) and genomic libraries. The nucleotide sequences of interest are preserved as inserts to a plasmid or the genome of a bacteriophage that has been used to infect bacterial cells.

A cDNA library represents all of the mRNA present in a particular tissue, which has been converted back to a DNA template by the use of the enzyme reverse transcriptase. A genomic library represents the entire DNA sequence of a genome, broken into fragments of a manageable size.

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