A method for introducing site-specific mutations using oligonucleotide primers and its application to site-saturation mutagenesis.

Oligonucleotide primer-directed mutagenesis is a useful molecular biological tool, which is invaluable for the study of the structure/function relationships in proteins and for the creation of mutant proteins possessing modified or novel biological activities. Mutagenesis studies in which a site-saturation approach is employed require a high-efficiency mutagenesis procedure, which will generate a population of mutated molecules containing an even distribution of all possible amino acid changes, or a subset thereof. This article describes such a mutagenesis technique and discusses the adaptations that are necessary to perform site-saturation mutagenesis.