This article is part of an anniversary issue of Journal of Molecular Evolution, commenting on a paper published on 1999 by the Nobel laureate Frances Arnold and her colleague Kentaro Miyazaki. The paper by Miyazaki and Arnold presented saturation mutagenesis as an alternative method to random mutagenesis for obtaining enzymes with increasing stability. Both techniques were conceived to accomplish directed evolution, an approach honoured by the Nobel Prize of Chemistry 2018. Here, I am commenting on the pros and cons of random and saturation mutagenesis, while also discussing important results from directed evolution. I conclude that molecular evolution is finding new applications in science and it is definitely an integral part of the genomic era’s revolution.

这篇文章是分子进化杂志周年纪念版的一部分，评论了诺贝尔奖获得者弗朗西斯·阿诺德和她的同事宫崎健太郎于 1999 年发表的一篇论文。Miyazaki 和 Arnold 的论文提出了饱和诱变作为随机诱变的替代方法，以获得稳定性增加的酶。这两种技术都是为了实现定向进化，一种获得 2018 年诺贝尔化学奖的方法。在这里，我将评论随机和饱和诱变的利弊，同时还讨论定向进化的重要结果。我的结论是，分子进化正在科学中找到新的应用，它绝对是基因组时代革命不可或缺的一部分。