‘Community evolution’ – laboratory strains and pedigrees in the age of genomics

Molecular microbiologists depend heavily on laboratory strains of bacteria, which are ubiquitous across the community of research groups working on a common organism. However, this presumes that strains present in different laboratories are in fact identical. Work on a culture of Vibrio cholerae preserved from 1916 provoked us to consider recent studies, which have used both classical genetics and next-generation sequencing to study the heterogeneity of laboratory strains. Here, we review and discuss mutations and phenotypic variation in supposedlyisogenic reference strains of V. cholerae and Escherichia coli , and we propose that by virtue of the dissemination of laboratory strains across the world, a large ‘community evolution’ experiment is currently ongoing.