S4: Development of a sexual recombination system to speed up evolutionary engineering in Escherichia coli

Evolutionary engineering of bacterial systems involve the asexual propagation of the strain under a selective pressure of interest.  However, due to the lack of recombination in asexual populations during the evolutionary process, synergistic mutations need to arise independently and beneficial mutations that arise compete with one another for expansion and may be lost from the population.  We hypothesize that improved adaptive mutants can be generated via genetic exchange between lineages, thereby speeding up evolutionary engineering.  We present a system that allows continuous in situ recombination in Escherichia coli and demonstrate that our system is stable, effective, and suitable for use in evolutionary engineering applications.