BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Maxygen: Evolution of DNA in vitro; Zaffaroni's enabling focus

June 9, 1997 7:00 AM UTC

Recombinant DNA techniques are the unquestioned foundation of biotechnology. Maxygen Inc. hopes to take this technology to a new level, combining DNA recombination plus mutation (to generate maximal diversity) with reiterative assays (screening or selection) to rapidly improve DNA sequences.

The technology, called gene shuffling or molecular breeding, mirrors the evolutionary process as a means to generate DNAs encoding improved genes, operons (sets of genes that act together) or vector sequences, but is obviously much faster than natural evolution...