Dr J-M. Sonet, Proteus, France

This presentation focused on the technology that Proteus uses to develop novel biocatalysis, working at the interface of two worlds – biotechnology and chemistry. Proteus has access to a wide variety of natural enzymes and organisms from very different environments, e.g. deep sea hydrothermal vents, (hyper)saline environments such as the Dead Sea, oil fields, hot volcanic environments and hypersaline deep sea basins. These organisms provide the starting point for controlled mutagenesis to produce a pool of parental genes, which are then recombined using L-Shuffling™. The principle of L-Shuffling™ is that parent genes, are fragmented and the fragments are then subjected to a series of cycles of denaturation / hybridisation to templates/ ligation before finally removing the templates to generate new gene diversity. An HTS screen called CLIPS-O™ was also described and this has been published (Org. Process Res. Dev., 2002, 7, 441).