High throughput screening and selection are the two main methods of library analysis in protein engineering. Screening can evaluate proteins with the desired property. High-throughput screening methods enable the rapid identification of desirable properties and greatly reduces the chance of missing the desired mutants. High throughput selection can directly eliminate unwanted protein variants by applying certain selection pressure on the mutant library. The fast development of high throughput screening and selection methods and the combination with automation has greatly advanced synthetic biology.

Figure 1. Schematic overview of high throughput screening methods. (Xiao H, et al., 2015)