Searching for folded proteins in vitro and in silico.

Understanding the sequence determinants of protein structure, stability and folding is critical for understanding how natural proteins have evolved and how proteins can be engineered to perform novel functions. The complexity of the protein folding problem requires the ability to search large volumes of sequence space for proteins with specific structural or functional characteristics. Here we describe our efforts to identify novel proteins using a phage-display selection strategy from a 'mini-exon' shuffling library generated from the yeast genome and from completely random sequence libraries, and compare the results to recent successes in generating novel proteins using in silico protein design.