Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) is a valuable complementary tool for modern strain development. Insights from ALE experiments enable the improvement of microbial cell factories regarding the growth rate and substrate utilization, among others. Most ALE experiments are conducted by serial passaging, a method that involves large amounts of repetitive manual labor and comes with inherent experimental design flaws. The acquisition of meaningful and reliable process data is a burdensome task and is often undervalued and neglected, but also unfeasible in shake flask experiments due to technical limitations. Some of these limitations are alleviated by emerging automated ALE methods on the μL and mL scale. A novel approach to conducting ALE experiments is described that is faster and more efficient than previously used methods. The conventional shake flask approach was translated to a parallelized, L scale stirred-tank bioreactor system that runs controlled, automated, repeated batch processes. The method was validated with a growth optimization experiment of E. coli K-12 MG1655 grown with glycerol minimal media as a benchmark. Off-gas analysis enables the continuous estimation of the biomass concentration and growth rate using a black-box model based on first principles (soft sensor). The proposed method led to the same stable growth rates of E. coli with the non-native carbon source glycerol 9.4 times faster than the traditional manual approach with serial passaging in uncontrolled shake flasks and 3.6 times faster than an automated approach on the mL scale. Furthermore, it is shown that the cumulative number of cell divisions (CCD) alone is not a suitable timescale for measuring and comparing evolutionary progress.
Keywords: Escherichia coli; adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE); batch process; biomass estimator; black box model; glycerol utilization; growth rate optimization; process automation; process development; repeated batch process.