Antibiotic-free protein expression
Are you looking for bacterial antibiotic-free plasmid fermentation solutions? We are excited to announce our method has been published in Microbial Cell Factories. We created a simple and flexible plasmid maintenance system by creating an E. coli strain with an essential gene under the control of an inducible promoter; the absence of the inducer creates strong selection pressure for a complementing plasmid. Once engineered, the strain can be propagated without plasmid (via inducer supplementation) and easily transformed with any complementing plasmid. We show this strategy works in a variety of E. coli strains and yields tight plasmid selection, without using any antibiotics or antibiotic resistance genes.
Take at look at the data yourself:
Let’s stop the reliance on antibiotics in microbial fermentation, so we can safeguard their effectivity for use in medicine.
Demonstration of long-term plasmid maintenance in unsupplemented LB-media from Brechun et al., 2024.