MOLECULAR EVOLUTION - A THEORY APPROACHES EXPERIMENTS

Applied Molecular evolution, especially in vitro techniques developed in the last few years have revolutionized the design of functional bio polymers. SELEX techniques for example have become particularly popula r. These methods have been enormously successful, yet this success is not trivial: the huge number of sequences being searched, the low conc entrations of individual species and the bias and noise inherent in th e techniques would seem to make these experiments very difficult. The theory presented here will give a comprehensive description of directe d molecular evolution of RNA molecules in detail and biopolymers in ge neral. Essential for an understanding is an adequate genotype-phenotyp e relationship. This relationship exhibits neutral properties which ex plain the success of these experimental methods. Influences of the ini tial library, the error rate, the cycle length and other parameters on the experiments are characterized. New problems arise in extending th e concept of evolutionary optimization of biopolymers in a Darwinian s cenario to complex reaction networks. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. A ll rights reserved.