Solid-Phase Methods and Instrumentation for Screening Libraries of Enzyme Variants

E nzymes and other biocatalysts are increasingly important tools for synthesizing pharmaceuticals, improving diagnostic assays, enhancing efficiency of industrial processes, manufacturing biopolymers, accelerating bioremediation, and converting biomass to useful products and fuels. Although a variety of enzymes are available as reaction catalysts, their performance is often less than optimal for some applications. Enzymes have evolved over millions of years to be efficient and selective catalysts for the chemical reactions taking place in living cells, and they typically are not optimized to provide high activity on unnatural substrates or to function in the presence of organic solvents and under reaction conditions never encountered in nature.