Directed evolution enables to customize proteins characteristics, until they meet the needs of their target application, whether for therapeutical of other industrial purposes. Directed evolution enables for instance to :
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Create industrial super-biocatalysts by improving productivity, stability under industrial conditions, specificity, waste release, cost of production, etc. ;
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Make proteins druggable by improving storage stability, biodisponibility, solubility, half-life, immunogenicity and other side-effects, etc.
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Directed molecular evolution mimics traditional breeding in an accelerated manner. Like breeders have been improving traits of cattle or plants, today’s molecular biologists at Proteus create new proteins with improved performance. However, unlike breeders who should wait for months or years until the animals or plants are able to reproduce, Proteus' technology is based on a fully in vitro procedure which enables to prepare thousands of new proteins within hours.
Proteus has developed the proprietary EvoSight™ and L-Shuffling™ technologies to create new variants of proteins starting from either a single parental gene or from a pool of parental proteins, respectively. Protéus is one of the very rare companies worldwide to have freedom to operate in directed evolution using today’s most powerful approach of directed evolution, i.e. gene shuffling. The technology is also available in the Dream'line service range of PSI.
Starting from the parental gene(s) coding for (a) non-optimized protein(s), we apply our proprietary technology to generate a library of second-generation genes. The resulting library is then expressed and screened to select the proteins having improved performance in the targeted application. This process can be repeated several times until the resulting protein meet or exceed the targeted specifications.