(272f) CAREER: A Toolkit for Directed Genome Evolution

Six years ago, I was lucky enough to receive funding from Fred Heineken and the NSF for my CAREER proposal. In the proposal it was argued that.... ?Genomics research has given rise to an exciting time in biotechnology where information about the sequence, structure, and function of genomes is becoming increasingly available and, with continued advances, will cease to be a rate-limiting step in many biological studies. A central premise of the research in our group is that continued advances along these lines will enable the extension of directed protein evolution to the genome scale. Doing so will require continued advances in i) tools for recombining and enriching useful mutations among multiple genomes, ii) methods for efficiently determining the genetic basis of so engineered phenotypes, and iii) theoretical frameworks for rationalizing relationships identified between genome structure and function.? This presentation will describe our efforts over the past 5 years to develop such tools and frameworks in support of the emerging field of Genome Engineering.