Tapping diversity lost in transformations—in vitro amplification of ligation reactions

Molecular evolution is a powerful means of engi-neering proteins. It usually requires the generation of a large recombinant DNA library of variants for cloning into a phage or plasmid vector, and the transformation of a host organism for expression and screening of the variant proteins. However, library size is often limited by the low yields of circular DNA and the poor transformation efficien-cies of linear DNA. Here we have overcome this limitation by amplification of recombinant circular DNA molecules directly from ligation reactions. The amplification by bacteriophage Phi29 polymerase increased the number of transformants; thus from a nanogram-scale ligation of DNA fragments com-prising two sub-libraries of variant antibody domains, we succeeded in amplifying a highly diverse and large combinatorial phage antibody library (.109 transformants in Escherichia coli and 105-fold more transformants than without amplifi-cation). From the amplified library, but not from the smaller un-amplified library, we could isolate sev-eral antibody fragments against a target antigen. It appears that amplification of ligations with Phi29 polymerase can help recover clones and molecular diversity otherwise lost in the transformation step. A further feature of the method is the option of using PCR-amplified vectors for ligations