🔈Paper out! We turned the most fascinating phage host-switch mechanism, diversity-generating retroelements, into a programmable mutagenesis tool, DGRec. You can perform targeted hypermutation of any 50-200bp sequence directly in vivo in E. coli www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Diversity-generating retroelements for programmable targeted hypermutagenesis - Nature Biotechnology

Diversity-generating retroelements are engineered for directed evolution in E.coli.

nature.com

Yesterday our paper "Intra-species competition combats vancomycin-resistant enterococci" was published online. We found an enterococcal strain that can outcompete a VRE strain, but loses its potency when given with other non resistant Enterococci. Here is a high res img from the battle in the gut: