Expanding Combinatorial Space in Bacterial Libraries for Synthetic Biology Applications

Although Synthetic and Systems Biology aspire to the design of biological systems,
combinatorial approaches remain efficient strategies to rapidly isolate functional designs
from a vast number of possible designs. High-quality libraries are therefore essential and
their assembly hinges on multiple practical and technical issues: (1) robustness of synthesis,
(2) stability and (3) sampling of the sequence space. Having recently developed a novel
approach to establish large multi-component in vivo libraries, we want to expand the
approach towards studying the fitness of synthetic phages and microcompartment
encapsulation of biological processes - by improving (1) and developing novel assays to
confirm (3).