摘要：micro-scale droplets (average diameter is approximately 0.8 μm), which continuously fuse and divide among each other at a controllable rate. In the droplets, an RNA (artificial genomic RNA) replicate through the translation of self-encoded RNA replicase with spontaneously appearing parasitic RNA. We performed two automated replication experiments for more than 400 hours with different mixing intensities. We found that several mutations displayed increased frequencies in the genomic RNA populations and the dominant RNA mutants acquired the ability to replicate faster or acquired resistance to the parasitic RNA, demonstrating that Darwinian evolution occurred during the long-term replication. The droplet flow reactor we developed can be a useful tool to perform in vitro evolutionary experiments of translation-coupled systems.
