Protein expression, evolution

Boder, E. T. and K. D. Wittrup. Yeast surface display for directed evolution of protein expression, affinity, and stability. Methods Enzymol (2000) 328 430-44. 

Drosophila preproFMRFamide resembles many other neuropeptide precursors in that it contains many related neuropeptides, and also has protein regions not obviously coding for neuropeptides. It is expressed by a small subset of neurons within the CNS, but these neurons are not obviously related by their ancestries, their positions or their apparent functions. This chapter summarizes our recent results detailing the structure, expression, evolution and genetics of Drosophila FMRFamide,... 

The evolution of protein expression during normal mouse prostate development was examined with MALDI IMS technology [37], In this case, protein expression and spatial localization was followed as a function of lobe specificity and age during organ development (1-5 weeks), at sexual maturation (6 weeks), and as adult (10, 15, or 40 weeks). In addition, the protein signatures from normal development... 

One advantage of directed evolution is that it does not require prior knowledge of a protein or the knowledge of which mutation to induce. Rather, mutations are randomly induced, and those mutations are monitored to see what effect they have on the protein expression in a cell. The difficulty of directed evolution is that it requires high throughput, in which lai e amounts of DNA must be mutated and the protein products monitored for the desired qualities. This process may not he feasible for all proteins. 

---