Artificial evolution by DNA shuffling

Improvement of enzymes is one of the important objectives of biotechnology. In vitro evolution of enzymes using DNA shuffling involves the assembly of two or more DNA segments into a full-length gene by homologous, or site-specific, recombination. Before the assembly, the segments are often subjected to random mutagenesis by error-prone PCR, random nucleotide insertion or other methods. Many useful enzymes and peptides have been isolated following the artificial evolution.