In both natural and, increasingly, synthetic biological systems, continuous evolution is a potentially important strategy for strain improvement. Despite several important technological advances in the development of continuous evolution methods, there are few strategies for the continuous evolution of specific genes or pathways. This prevents the artificial evolution of, for example, strains where evolution should be focused on one or a few genes to yield improved production capacities or novel products. In consequence, we have begun to develop a platform for artificial, continuous evolution that is essentially Lamarckian in nature, in that mutations are focused on particular genes, via retroelement-mediated insertion of mutant mRNAs. We will present results on model systems that can be expanded to virtually any set of genes.

Retroelements for continuous evolution

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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