High-throughput Protein Design and Evolution for Synthetic Biology - Erika DeBenedictis

Natural proteins evolved over billions of years, with numerous populations using chance and selection to create useful proteins. This talk will describe PRANCE, an high-throughput protein engineering method that mimics natural evolution. By combining liquid handling robotics and molecular engineering techniques, PRANCE allows us to overcome features of natural evolution that make it challenging to use as an engineering technique, like stochasticity and extinction. These advances make directed evolution more interpretable, accessible, and reproducible. We show that high-throughput directed evolution creates new engineering approaches for large-scale biological engineering challenges like genetic code expansion.