The SeSaM-Biotech Diversity Generation Challenge

This is a voluntary ungraded assignment!

As we have seen in the video, mutation bias is a major challenge in protein engineering. The reasons for mutation bias are manifold, e.g. the DNA polymerase enzyme or the genetic code itself. Yet, to access the full diversity of an enzyme’s amino acid sequence space is essential to find the full complement of a given enzyme’s improved variants. The image below has been taken from Video 2.3.2 and sums up several of the biases. (Hint: you will need the information in the image to answer the questions in the assignment.)

Our consortium partner SeSaM-Biotech GmbH company from Aachen, Germany, is a specialized service provider for protein engineering and directed evolution services. The company was funded by Professor Schwaneberg in 2008 in Bremen, Germany, and holds the patent for the Sequence Saturation Mutagenesis (SeSaM) method. The following assignment was kindly provided by Dr. David Schönauer, CEO of SeSaM-Biotech GmBH. It is voluntary, ungraded and self-assessed. Please feel free to use this assessment to test your skills and understanding of the challenges of diversity generation on a real-life example.

Figure 2: Mutational bias