Abstract
Neutral drift is a recently developed experimental technique used to identify superior starting points for protein engineering. Neutral drift explores accessible sequence space by repeated rounds of mutagenesis and selection to maintain wild-type function. Mutations that are largely neutral for the native function accumulate, and those that are highly detrimental are purged, yielding a library of high diversity and quality. This technique is useful in situations where laboratory evolution is at a dead end, i.e., when the enzyme activity intended for evolution proves recalcitrant to improvements or is too low to be detected.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Canada Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). N.T. is a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar.
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Kaltenbach, M., Tokuriki, N. (2014). Generation of Effective Libraries by Neutral Drift. In: Gillam, E., Copp, J., Ackerley, D. (eds) Directed Evolution Library Creation. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1179. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1053-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1053-3_5
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