MIT News December 30, 2021
Evolution is commonly used to engineer proteins and RNA, but experimental constraints have limited the ability to reproducibly and reliably explore factors such as population diversity, the timing of environmental changes and chance on outcomes. Researchers at MIT have developed a robotic platform termed phage- and robotics-assisted near-continuous evolution (PRANCE) to comprehensively explore biomolecular evolution by performing phage-assisted continuous evolution in high-throughput. PRANCE implements an automated feedback control system that adjusts the stringency of selection in response to real-time measurements of each molecular activity. In evolving three distinct types of biomolecule, they found that evolution is reproducibly altered by both random chance and the historical pattern of environmental changes. This work improves the reliability of protein engineering and enables the systematic analysis of the historical, environmental, and random factors governing biomolecular evolution. The platform can perform 100 times as many directed-evolution experiments in parallel, giving many more populations the chance to come up with a solution, while monitoring their progress in real-time…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
A new robotic platform can speed up directed evolution more than 100-fold… Credit: istockphoto