Cadmium Resistance E.coli strains

Cadmium (Cd) is a heavy metal that is extremely toxic to many organisms; however, microbes are highly adaptable to extreme conditions, including heavy metal contamination. Bacteria can evolve in the natural environment, generating resistant strains that can be studied to understand heavy metal resistance mechanisms, but obtaining such adaptive strains usually takes a long time. In this study, the genome replication engineering-assisted continuous evolution (GREACE) method was used to accelerate the evolutionary rate of the Escherichia coli genome to screen for E. coli mutants with high resistance to cadmium.