Construction of a mutant library of horseradish peroxidase gene by directed evolution and development of an in situ screening method

A process of directed evolution applied to obtain a library of mutants of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) enzyme is described. We have introduced slight variations into the original DNA shuffling protocol. A DNA template was prepared by PCR amplification and digested with Dnase I during 1 hour. Dnase I products were concentrated by precipitation with isopropanol. Gel electrophoresis showed fragments of the desired size range (20-600 pb) without a full-length template remaining in the reaction mixture. A high concentration of fragments was crucial for performing PCR without primers. In this case, a template concentration of 32.5 ng/mu l was appropriate. Amplification of recombinant genes in a standard PCR reaction (template dilution 1:100) produced a smear with a low yield for the full-length sequence. A single product of the correct size was obtained by PCR with nested primers separated from the previously used primers by 40 pb. In our laboratory, native HRP has been functionally expressed in a baculovirus expression vector system. The purpose is to develop the screening of the first generation of random mutants in this system. To facilitate detection of those clones that have high peroxidase activity, we developed a rapid method: after five days postinfection agarose plates with six wells were covered with DAB (3,3´-diaminobenzidine) and H2O2. The appearance of brown-black stain allows visualization of up to 100 active clones/well in only 1 min

Optimization of Combinatorial Mutagenesis

Abstract. Protein engineering by combinatorial site-directed mutagenesis evaluates a portion of the sequence space near a target protein, seeking variants with improved properties (stability, activity, immunogenicity, etc.). In order to improve the hit-rate of beneficial variants in such mutagenesis libraries, we develop methods to select optimal positions and corresponding sets of the mutations that will be used, in all combinations, in constructing a library for experimental evaluation. Our approach, OCoM (Optimization of Combinatorial Mutagenesis), encompasses both degenerate oligonucleotides and specified point mutations, and can be directed accordingly by requirements of experimental cost and library size. It evaluates the quality of the resulting library by oneand two-body sequence potentials, averaged over the variants. To ensure that it is not simply recapitulating extant sequences, it balances the quality of a library with an explicit evaluation of the novelty of its members. We show that, despite dealing with a combinatorial set of variants, i