Strain used in microbial evolution studies. Escherichia coli B str. REL606

Escherichia coli B. Escherichia coli B has been serving not only as a research model for the study of phage sensitivity, restriction systems, and bacterial evolution, but also as a workhorse for protein expression in life science laboratories and in the biotech industry. Escherichia coli B str. REL606. This strain is unable to use arabinose due to a mutation and has been used in long term evolution experiments to study rates of mutation and adaption. The genome information of E. coli B str. REL606 was determined by an international collaboration, revealing a number of genomic regions unique to either B or K-12 despite very high sequence similarities among the conserved genes.