Adaptive Laboratory Evolution (ALE): E. coli 498 meets toxic industrial reaction water
A concise overview of how morbidostat-based adaptive laboratory evolution can shift E. coli 498 toward tolerance of toxic reaction water — and how I validate the adaptation with data and bioassays.
By Elijá Friedrich-Ulrich
The coatings industry produces toxic reaction water: an organic waste stream that today just gets incinerated. My thesis asks whether a microbe can be trained to live on the very compounds that make it toxic.
I adapt a BSL-1 strain of E. coli to industrial reaction water using adaptive laboratory evolution. By limiting other nutrients and keeping the cells under selective pressure, the population learns to use the water's toxic organic compounds as a carbon source. Two goals: strip the toxic load out of the waste stream biologically, and cut the environmental cost of the chemical industry.
The experiments run on a Replifactory — a multiplexed, automated morbidostat for continuous culture. It reads the culture's growth in real time and adjusts the reaction-water concentration on the fly, so the selective pressure stays constant while E. coli 498 adapts.
On the analysis side, I build data pipelines to process time-series measurements and interpret adaptation trajectories (e.g., OD600 dynamics). To validate safety and relevance beyond growth alone, I use ecotoxicity bioassays.
Adaptive laboratory evolution is not a single experiment — it's a system. In EcoCoat, the workflow spans experimental control, careful data handling, and validation. My takeaway is that the strongest results come from treating the lab and the codebase as one integrated system: set it up cleanly, iterate quickly, and verify what changed.