Abstract
Methods to evolve synthetic, rather than biological, polymers could significantly expand the functional potential of polymers that emerge from in vitro evolution. Requirements for synthetic polymer evolution include (i) sequence-specific polymerization of synthetic building blocks on an amplifiable template, (ii) display of the newly translated polymer strand in a manner that allows it to adopt folded structures, (iii) selection of synthetic polymer libraries for desired binding or catalytic properties and (iv) amplification of template sequences that survive selection in a manner that allows subsequent translation. Here we report the development of such a system for peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) using a set of 12 PNA pentamer building blocks. We validated the system by performing six iterated cycles of translation, selection and amplification on a library of 4.3 x 10(8) PNA-encoding DNA templates and observed >1,000,000-fold overall enrichment of a template encoding a biotinylated (streptavidin-binding) PNA. These results collectively provide an experimental foundation for PNA evolution in the laboratory.