Enzyme engineering in biomimetic compartments

The success of a directed evolution approach to creating custom-made enzymes relies in no small part on screening as many clones as possible. The miniaturisation of assays into pico to femtoliter compartments (emulsion droplets, vesicles or gel-shell beads) makes directed evolution campaigns practically more straightforward than current large scale industrial screening that requires liquid handling equipment and much manpower. Several recent experimental formats have established protocols to screen more than 10 million compartments per day, representing unprecedented throughput at low cost. This review introduces the emerging approaches towards making biomimetic man-made compartments that are poised to be adapted by a wider circle of researchers. In addition to cost and time saving, control of selection pressures and conditions, the quantitative readout that reports on every library members and the ability to develop strategies based on these data will increase the degrees of freedom in designing and testing strategies for directed evolution experiments.