Acinetobacter ADP1 Adaptive Laboratory Evolution

We performed a long-term adaptive evolution experiment with the highly transformable bacterium Acinetobacter baylyi ADP1. This strain has been proposed as a next-generation chassis organism for synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. Our goal was to characterize the overall genetic and phenotypic stability of this strain. We observed that mutations often resulted in lowered competence for DNA uptake and cellular aggregation after 1000-generations of evolution. Insertions of IS1236 were a major driver for these phenotypic changes.