EASy Evolution Accelerates Enzyme Engineering

Microbes evolve new traits quickly, but not quickly enough for scientists eager to direct the evolution of microbes toward desirable ends. Usually, scientists must wait for chance occurrences to create an evolution-accelerating change called gene amplification, which multiplies the copies of a gene that may acquire new and potentially beneficial mutations. To make gene amplification fast and easy, scientists based at the Department of Energy (DOE) and the University of Georgia developed a method