Indole generates quiescent and metabolically active Escherichia coli cultures.

An inherent problem with bacterial cell factories used to produce recombinant proteins or metabolites is that resources are channeled into unwanted biomass as well as product. Over several years, attempts have been made to increase efficiency by unlinking biomass and product generation. One example was the quiescent cell (Q-Cell) expression system that generated non-growing but metabolically active Escherichia coli by over-expressing a regulatory RNA (Rcd) in a defined genetic background.