ArticleScience advances2020
Accelerated evolution of a minimal 63-amino acid dual transcription factor.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bridging continuous and discrete evolution through a controllable, hypermutagenic phage-bacteria system.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Phage-assisted evolution of allosteric protein switches.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Molecular Mechanisms of Gain-of-Function Mutations in λ Cro Revealed by Molecular Dynamics Simulations.ACS physical chemistry Au · 2025Article
- Emergence of activation or repression in transcriptional control under a fixed molecular context.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Programmable gene insertion in human cells with a laboratory-evolved CRISPR-associated transposase.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Engineered Phage Enables Efficient Control of Gene Expression upon Infection of the Host Cell.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Continuous evolution of compact protein degradation tags regulated by selective molecular glues.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Evolution of an adenine base editor into a small, efficient cytosine base editor with low off-target activity.Nature biotechnology · 2023Article
- A primer to directed evolution: current methodologies and future directions.RSC chemical biology · 2023Review
- Transcription factor-based biosensors for screening and dynamic regulation.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2023Review
- Inducible directed evolution of complex phenotypes in bacteria.Nucleic acids research · 2022Article
- The contribution of bacteriophages to the aetiology and treatment of the bacterial vaginosis syndrome.Faculty reviews · 2022Review
- Phage satellites and their emerging applications in biotechnology.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2021Review
- Systems for in vivo hypermutation: a quest for scale and depth in directed evolution.Current opinion in chemical biology · 2021Review
- Dynamical model fitting to a synthetic positive feedback circuit inEngineering biology · 2020Article
- Reducing metabolic burden in the PACEmid evolver system by remastering high-copy phagemid vectors.Engineering biologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Transcription factors control gene expression in all life. This raises the question of what is the smallest protein that can support such activity. In nature, Cro from bacteriophage λ is one of the smallest known repressors (66 amino acids), and activators are typically much larger (e.g., λ cI, 237 amino acids). Previous efforts to engineer a minimal activator from λ Cro resulted in no activity in vivo in cells. In this study, we show that directed evolution results in a new Cro activator-repressor that functions as efficiently as λ cI in vivo. To achieve this, we develop phagemid-assisted continuous evolution (PACEmid). We find that a peptide as small as 63 amino acids functions efficiently as an activator and/or repressor. To our knowledge, this is the smallest protein activator that enables polymerase recruitment, highlighting the capacity of transcription factors to evolve from very short peptide sequences.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.