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Abstract:
To be innovative, molecular evolution needs to screen a gigantic search space, e.g., for a protein of “typcial” length with 300 amino acids, 20300 (equal to a number with 391 zeroes) combinations are possible. It has been a long-standing riddle how evolution has managed to find the presumably small patches in this sheer endless space, which host functional and structured proteins (1). A common theme in many areas of evolution is modularity, which helps to reuse existing parts efficiently and puts them together such that novel traits can be explored with less danger to go astray.
