The staggered extension process (also referred to as StEP) is a common technique used in

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...

and

molecular biology Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions. The study of chemical and physi ...

to create new, mutated genes with qualities of one or more initial genes. The technique itself is a modified

polymerase chain reaction The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a method widely used to rapidly make millions to billions of copies (complete or partial) of a specific DNA sample, allowing scientists to take a very small sample of DNA and amplify it (or a part of it) t ...

with very short (approximately 10 seconds) cycles. In these cycles the elongation of DNA is very quick (only a few hundred base pairs) and synthesized fragments anneal with complementary fragments of other strands. In this way, mutations of the initial genes are shuffled and in the end genes with new combinations of mutations are amplified. The StEP protocol has been found to be useful as a method of

directed evolution Directed evolution (DE) is a method used in protein engineering that mimics the process of natural selection to steer proteins or nucleic acids toward a user-defined goal. It consists of subjecting a gene to iterative rounds of mutagenesis ( ...

for the discovery of enzymes useful to industry.

References

{{reflist Genetics Molecular biology techniques