Advances in protein engineering and its application in synthetic biology

Protein engineering has been used successfully in fields ranging from medicine to food science to biofuels. Applications of protein engineering include developing antiviral peptides or other protein therapeutics, antibody engineering, designing protein-based logic circuits, engineering enzymes to be more specific or to function under industrially relevant conditions such as at higher temperatures or high/low pH, modifying cell signaling or regulatory functions, and so on. Advances in recombinant DNA, “omics, " and CRISPR-Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and its associated proteins) technologies, combined with high-throughput screening facilities, will lead to improved methods for protein engineering, enabling easy modification of more proteins/enzymes for new specific applications. New methods for rational design, directed evolution, and computer-aided protein design will further accelerate the speed of protein evolution and expand the scope for protein engineering. In this chapter we discuss general protein engineering strategies and advances in engineering proteins with desired functions, focusing on the “design” and “build” part of the design-build-test-learn cycle.