Autotrophic growth of is achieved by a small number of genetic changes.

Synthetic autotrophy is a promising avenue to sustainable bioproduction from CO. Here, we use iterative laboratory evolution to generate several distinct autotrophic strains. Utilising this genetic diversity, we identify that just three mutations are sufficient for to grow autotrophically, when introduced alongside non-native energy (formate dehydrogenase) and carbon-fixing (RuBisCO, phosphoribulokinase, carbonic anhydrase) modules.

gUMI-BEAR, a modular, unsupervised population barcoding method to track variants and evolution at high resolution.

Cellular lineage tracking provides a means to observe population makeup at the clonal level, allowing exploration of heterogeneity, evolutionary and developmental processes and individual clones' relative fitness. It has thus contributed significantly to understanding microbial evolution, organ differentiation and cancer heterogeneity, among others. Its use, however, is limited because existing methods are highly specific, expensive, labour-intensive, and, critically, do not allow the repetition of experiments.

Evolthon: A community endeavor to evolve lab evolution.

In experimental evolution, scientists evolve organisms in the lab, typically by challenging them to new environmental conditions. How best to evolve a desired trait? Should the challenge be applied abruptly, gradually, periodically, sporadically? Should one apply chemical mutagenesis, and do strains with high innate mutation rate evolve faster? What are ideal population sizes of evolving populations? There are endless strategies, beyond those that can be exposed by individual labs. We therefore arranged a community challenge, Evolthon, in which students and scientists from different labs were asked to evolve Escherichia coli or Saccharomyces cerevisiae for an abiotic stress-low temperature.

A Bacterial Growth Law out of Steady State.

Bacterial growth follows simple laws in constant conditions. However, bacteria in nature often face fluctuating environments. We therefore ask whether there are growth laws that apply to changing environments.