Recently, in vivo recombination techniques have been used as an alternative tool for subcloning and library construction in
S. cerevisiae. Library construction using in vivo recombination in yeast eliminates the gene manipulation steps in
Escherichia coli and the possibility of expression bias for eukaryote-originated proteins in
E. coli. Family shuffling can also be anticipated with in vivo recombination (
1). To construct a mutant library using directed evolution in
H. polymorpha, we developed an in vivo recombination system using various combinations of DNA fragments from the CALB expression vector pGK-CALB-CwpF in
H. polymorpha.
Among the various DNA fragments tested, the acceptor and the insert both containing HARS36 at the end of the fragments exhibited dramatically higher transformation efficiencies than the circular plasmid. Transforming DNA was always found in the chromosome instead of a plasmid. The fate of two overlapping DNA fragments was different in
S. cerevisiae in which the fragments formed an episomal plasmid (
17). Recent reports have indicated that the GC content of the targeting sequence is important for recombination due to increased stability of the pairing, which supports the exceptionally high recombination efficiency of telomeric repeats (
9). Frequent recombination between telomeres (
12) and between plasmids and chromosomes (
5) has also been reported. Therefore, the high frequency of in vivo recombination obtained with HARS36 probably results from direct integration of transforming DNA fragments into the multiple and recombinogenic targets in the chromosome of
H. polymorpha.
A mutant library for directed evolution can be constructed by in vivo recombination of PCR-amplified DNA fragments with the acceptor vector. In
Bacillus subtilis and
Acinetobacter calcoaceticus, PCR-amplified DNA was efficiently captured by marker replacement recombination (
18). Also, in
S. cerevisiae, shuffled P450 gene fragments were recombined with the vector fragment in the cell to constitute a library (
1). To use PCR-based gene fragments for library construction through in vivo recombination in
H. polymorpha, the overlapping sequences of the acceptor and the insert were optimized in this study. The use of in vivo recombination diminished the problems usually encountered in library construction in
H. polymorpha, such as variations in the copy number and the integration locus. Transformants from the circular vector with HARS36 usually showed over 50% multiple integrations (
3). When the acceptor and the insert shared the 475-bp 3′-overlapping sequence in HARS36, the portion of the transformants with multiple gene integration was approximately 15%. After deletion of the shared HARS36 from each fragment, all tested clones showed single-copy gene integration and an even level of CALB activity, probably caused by recircularization and multimerization inabilities of the two linearized transforming DNAs. This fact will be useful for activity-based selection of mutant proteins after directed evolution. Moreover, the transformation efficiency was enhanced more than 10 times compared to that obtained with the circular plasmid. It will be sufficient for construction of a highly diverse library. The cloning steps can also be greatly simplified by eliminating the library-cloning step in
E. coli.
In this work, we constructed a mutant library for C. antarctica lipase B using in vivo recombination and error-prone PCR techniques. We recovered diverse lipase sequences from randomly selected clones, indicating efficient construction of a random library. The in vivo recombination technique using HARS36 will be useful for generation of diverse gene libraries for directed evolution in H. polymorpha.