Fighting the battle against evolution: designing genetically modified organisms for evolutionary stability

Evolutionary stability is a key challenge for the advancement of synthetic biology and biotechnology. Epigenetic gene silencing, and not only mutations can render engineered cells useless. There are three major approaches for improving the stability of synthetic genes: reducing mutation; decreasing their metabolic burden; and creating a dependence on the synthetic gene. A complementary approach, using multiple tools, is expected to yield the greatest increase in stability. Most existing tools are only suitable for specific model organisms and are not generic.