ABSTRACT
While our understanding of biological systems may one day be sufciently comprehensive to engineer proteins in a direct and targeted fashion with predictable outcomes, biological complexity continues to stie even seemingly simple “rational” engineering plans, often leaving combinatorial approaches as the most likely means of achieving a desired phenotype. A key step in biocatalyst design is the development of high-throughput screening procedures to identify a specic, improved cellular phenotype (e.g., productivity) or enzyme property of interest. Although an abundance of recombinant DNA and molecular cloning methods provide the protein engineering community with a myriad of approaches to genetic library construction (refer to Chapter 4 in this volume), we are often constrained by the current capabilities of high-throughput screening or selection technologies.
