Abstract
Adaptive laboratory evolution for microbial cells has become an indispensable tool for metabolic engineering and system and synthetic biology. Commercial bioreactors, however, are cumbersome to use and difficult to meet special needs for adaptive laboratory evolution, and there has been the recent renaissance of mini-bioreactor of working volume in the milliliter range. Leveraging on availability of low-cost electronic components such as light-emitting diode and microcontroller board, we have developed a low-cost, flexible, and robust bioreactor platform. We detail two examples of our design, namely the morbidostat and optogenetic bioreactors for antibiotic drug resistance study and optically controlled evolution, respectively. These mini-bioreactors will be useful tools for adaptive laboratory evolution for microbial cells.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Dr. Teuta Pilizota’s laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, Han-Jia Lin’s laboratory at the National Ocean University, and Prof. Charles Carter’s laboratory at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill for their becoming early adopters as well as for their input on our design and assembly instructions. The author would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ministry of Science and Technology under grant numbers MOST 105-2221-E-007-MY3.
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Yang, YT. (2018). Mini-bioreactors as Tools for Adaptive Laboratory Evolution for Antibiotic Drug Resistance and Evolutionary Tuning of Bacterial Optogenetic Circuits. In: Pontarotti, P. (eds) Origin and Evolution of Biodiversity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95954-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95954-2_5
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