Skip to main content
Figure 1 | Microbial Cell Factories

Figure 1

From: Strategies for the multiplex mapping of genes to traits

Figure 1

Overview of inverse engineering approaches. Inverse engineering begins with a wild-type cell line in which a large number of mutations are introduced in either a random or directed manner to generate phenotypic diversity. These mutants are subjected to screening or selection for a trait of interest (i.e. solvent/temperature tolerance or metabolite production). The pre and post selection populations are sequenced or genotyped by microarray hybridization. The fitness (W i ) of the each genotype (g i ) can be computed by the equation to obtain a plot of fitness (far right circle) where each bar represents a specific genetic loci. Alleles identified by this can be used to guide more focused combinatorial optimization on the trait of interest using directed techniques such as MAGE [16]. While this provides a promising algorithm for directed evolution on the genome scale future technologies will need to be developed to enable this engineering cycle to be preformed rapidly and recursively (indicated by the red arrows) by tracking gene combinations in a high-throughput fashion.

Back to article page