Molecular therapy : the journal of the American Society of Gene Therapy
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Directed evolution of adeno-associated virus (AAV) through successive rounds of phenotypic selection is a powerful method to isolate variants with improved properties from large libraries of capsid mutants. Importantly, AAV libraries used for directed evolution are based on the "natural" AAV genome organization where the capsid proteins are encoded in cis from replicating genomes. This is necessary to allow the recovery of the capsid DNA after each step of phenotypic selection. ⋯ Next-generation sequencing of AAV progeny generated by bulk transfection of a semi-random peptide library showed a strong counter-selection of capsid variants encoding premature stop codons, which further supports a strong capsid-genome identity correlation. Overall, our observations demonstrate that production of "natural" AAVs results in low capsid mosaicism and high capsid-genome correlation. These unique properties allow the production of highly diverse AAV libraries in a one-step procedure with a minimal loss in phenotype-genotype correlation.