Protein evolution using on-chip microfluidics

Directed evolution is a robust technique to engineer proteins with desired properties. However, it is time-consuming and resource-intensive due to multiple rounds of mutagenesis, protein expression, and variant screening. On-chip microfluidic technology holds great promise to accelerate this process by generating monodispersed biomimetic compartments in a high-throughput manner, enabling screening of massive gene libraries and ensuring phenotype-to-genotype linkage. The main aim of the project is to setup a microfluidic platform for to evolve CRISPR Cas9, a gene-editing enzyme to exhibit higher activity using on-chip droplet technology.