About four billion years ago our planet was at a historic turning point. While organic chemistry had already been invented, the recent generation of organic molecules was profoundly different. They organized into spatially confined structures and self-replicated at an ever-increasing speed. Soon, the freely available organic building blocks became limited and the increasingly complex structures began to actively compete for resources and space. Life emerged and with it the Darwinian evolution.

The concept of life turned out to be immensely powerful and rapidly transformed our planet into what ET could easily describe as a huge bioreactor. Innumerable rounds of mutation and selection over billions of years gave rise to the beautiful biological diversity and complexity we can appreciate today. Life appears to seamlessly adapt to even the most harsh and unfriendly environments by finding clever solutions – provided it has enough time to do so. And this is where our project begins.

This year, the iGEM team Heidelberg aims at harnessing the enormous power of Darwinian evolution to facilitate the development of biomolecules for human benefit. To this end, we will build upon the PACE (phage-assisted continuous evolution) method, which miniaturizes and accelerates evolution and governs it towards a predefined purpose. PACE couples the survival of quickly mutating phages carrying a scaffold protein to directed selection within E. coli hosts. Thereby, proteins with desired properties can be evolved within hours instead of centuries.
To harness its enormous potential, we will create a comprehensive and standardized toolbox and accompanying software that will enable the application of PACE on diverse protein classes, including enzymes for pharmaceutical and biomaterial production.