Systems and methods for amplification and phage display

Abstract

The present invention generally relates to amplification of biological entities, for example, for phage display. In one aspect, members of a library of biological entities are encapsulated in separate compartments (e.g., in separate microfluidic droplets) and amplified. As a specific example, by putting members of a phage display library into microfluidic droplets such that no droplet contains more than one member of the library, the library can be amplified without any substantial changes in growth rates or population distributions, or other artifacts created due to differences in growth rates or amplification between different members of the library. In some cases, the volume of the compartments can be used to control the copy number of a biological entity during amplification. In certain cases, biological entities with different amplification rates can be amplified independently of each other. In some embodiments, the ratio of a rapidly amplifying biological entity to a slowly amplifying biological entity can be controlled. This can be advantageous, for example, in preserving diversity within a library by preventing rapidly amplifying biological entities from outcompeting slowly amplifying biological entities. For example, certain methods and systems of the invention can be useful in situations where preferential amplification of library members can present a problem.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.