EVOdrops, a European training network, brings together the leading research scientists, laboratories and industries in Europe with outstanding expertise in protein engineering and microfluidics and 13 early stage researchers. We offer an extensive multi- and interdisciplinary training to ensure that they can solve these urgent and unmet challenges in biotechnology and biomedicine. We use a multidisciplinary approach combining soft matter, microfluidics and chemical biology to design solutions for the selection of new enzymes of industrial and therapeutic interest. In the future, our approaches can be generalized to challenges involving high-throughput miniaturised biochemical or cell-based assays.

EVOdrops is a translational approach for microfluidics and biochemical methods towards the engineering of proteins and systems of industrial or therapeutic interest. Two fundamental aspects of protein engineering will be effectively combined:

1. Generation of a large and controlled genetic diversity usable as a pool of active catalysts containing unknown variants of interest.
2. Analysis and selection at an ultra-high throughput of libraries to identify improved variants fulfilling the user-defined constraints (rate of catalysis, specificity, stability).

Project website:

https://evodropseu.wordpress.com/