OneClick: A Program for Designing Focused Mutagenesis Experiments

OneClick is a user-friendly web-based program, developed specifically for quick-and-easy design of focused mutagenesis experiments (e.g., site-directed mutagenesis and saturation mutagenesis). Written in Perl and developed into a web application using CGI programming, OneClick offers a step-by-step experimental design, from mutagenic primer design to analysis of a mutant library. Upon input of a DNA sequence encoding the protein of interest, OneClick designs the mutagenic primers according to user input, e.g., amino acid position to mutate, type of amino acid substitutions (e.g., substitution to a group of amino acids with similar chemical property) and type of mutagenic primers. OneClick has incorporated an extensive range of commercially available plasmids and DNA polymerases suitable for focused mutagenesis. Therefore, OneClick also provides information on PCR mixture preparation, thermal cycling condition, expected size of PCR product and agar plate to use during bacterial transformation. Importantly, OneClick also carries out a statistical analysis of the resultant mutant library, information of which is important for selection/screening. OneClick is a unique and invaluable tool in the field of protein engineering, allowing for systematic construction of a mutant library or a protein variant and simplifying molecular biology work. The program will be constantly updated to reflect the rapid development in the fields of molecular biology and protein engineering.