Several methods have been reported for the removal of error-containing sequences in populations of DNA. These methods rely upon the selective destruction (14, 15) or physical separation (16, 17) of mismatch-containing heteroduplexes. Smith and Modrich (14) reported the selective destruction of error-containing sequences in PCR products by generating dsDNA breaks upon overdigestion with the Escherichia coli mismatch-specific endonuclease MutHLS (18) . Gel purification and cloning of the remaining full-length DNA resulted in an apparent 10-fold reduction in the error rate for PCR products. However, the existing approaches are not well suited for error removal in long synthetic DNA sequences where virtually all members in the population contain multiple errors. The online version of this article has been published under an open access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the open access version of this article for non-commercial purposes provided that: the original authorship is properly and fully attributed; the Journal and Oxford University Press are attributed as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given; if an article is subsequently reproduced or disseminated not in its entirety but only in part or as a derivative work this must be clearly indicated. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oupjournals.org Error correction with MutS is outlined in Figure 1 . The population of DNA molecules containing random errors is first re-hybridized to expose synthesis errors as mismatches ( Figure 1A ). Duplexes containing mismatches can then be removed from the population by affinity capture with immobilized MutS ( Figure 1B) , a process we term coincidence filtering, since both strands of the duplex must match to pass this filtering step. For long synthetic DNA sequences or for sequences with high error rates, coincidence filtering is ineffective, since the likelihood of both strands being perfectly matched after re-hybridization is very low. To generalize MutS error filtering for application on synthetic DNA, the synthetic DNA is cleaved into small overlapping fragments before MutS filtering. Fragments containing mismatches are selectively removed through absorption to an immobilized maltose-binding protein (MBP)-Thermus aquaticus (Taq) MutS-His 6 fusion protein (MBP-MutS-H6) (18) (19) (20) . The remaining mixture of fragments (enriched with fragments of the correct sequence) serves as a template for assembly PCR to produce the full-length product ( Figure 1C ). This process can be iterated until the consensus sequence emerges as the dominant species in the population. This approach is equivalent to DNA shuffling (21) with additional mismatch exposure and removal steps.