Methods and compositions for cellular and metabolic engineering

Abstract

The present invention is generally directed to the evolution of new metabolic pathways and the enhancement of bioprocessing through a process herein termed recursive sequence recombination. Recursive sequence recombination entails performing iterative cycles of recombination and screening or selection to “evolve” individual genes, whole plasmids or viruses, multigene clusters, or even whole genomes. Such techniques do not require the extensive analysis and computation required by conventional methods for metabolic engineering.

1 . A method of evolving a biocatalytic activity of a cell, comprising: 
 (a) recombining at least a first and second DNA segment from at least one gene conferring ability to catalyze a reaction of interest, the segments differing from each other in at least two nucleotides, to produce a library of recombinant genes;    (b) screening at least one recombinant gene from the library that confers enhanced ability to catalyze the reaction of interest by the cell relative to a wildtype form of the gene;    (c) recombining at least a segment from the at least one recombinant gene with a further DNA segment from the at least one gene, the same or different from the first and second segments, to produce a further library of recombinant genes;    (d) screening at least one further recombinant gene from the further library of recombinant genes that confers enhanced ability to catalyze the reaction of interest by the cell relative to a previous recombinant gene;    (e) repeating (c) and (d), as necessary, until the further recombinant gene confers a desired level of enhanced ability to catalyze the reaction of interest by the cell.    
     
     
         2 - 30 . (canceled)