Escherichia coli selection strains for growth-coupled metabolic engineering

Synthetic metabolism has the potential to transform carbon capture, bioremediation, or bioproduction strategies. To transfer metabolic designs from an in vitro context to living model systems such as the bacterium Escherichia coli, metabolic engineers incentivize the maintenance and use of the introduced metabolic module by making cell survival dependent on it (growth-coupled selection). However, creating and characterizing appropriately rewired selection strains is nontrivial and requires labor-intensive growth phenotyping in various conditions. To enhance the community use of extant selection strains, we compiled designs covering the central, amino acid, and energy metabolism of E. coli for this review, and we revisit the key concepts of growth-coupled selection.