Evolution has shaped the development of proteins with an incredible diversity of properties. Incorporating proteins into materials is desirable for applications including biosensing; however, high-throughput selection techniques for screening protein libraries in materials contexts is lacking. In this work, a high-throughput platform to assess the binding affinity for ordered sensing proteins was established. A library of fusion proteins, consisting of an elastin-like polypeptide block, one of 22 variants of rcSso7d, and a coiled-coil order-directing sequence, was generated. All selected variants had high binding in films, likely due to the similarity of the assay to magnetic bead sorting used for initial selection, while solution binding was more variable. From these results, both the assembly of the fusion proteins in their operating state and the functionality of the binding protein are key factors in the biosensing performance. Thus, the integration of directed evolution with assembled systems is necessary to the design of better materials.
Keywords: biosensors; directed evolution; high-throughput experimentation; protein materials.