Generation of effective libraries by neutral drift.

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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