Williams, Peter A. and Cane, Patricia A. and Jeenes, David J. and Pickup, Roger W. (1983) Correlation Between Spontaneous Phenotypic Changes in Pseudomonas Strains with Changes in the Structure of Catabolic Plasmids : Experiences with TOL Plasmids. In: Basic Biology of New Developments in Biotechnology :. Basic Life Sciences . Plenum Press, pp. 519-552. ISBN 0306412446
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
It is part of the traditional lore of microbiology departments, handed down by word of mouth but largely unrecorded in the literature, that bacteria, isolated from the environment for their ability to perform particularly interesting metabolic functions, often show an infuriating instability. The usual version of the story is that a strain, originally obtained by selective enrichment on some esoteric compound as sole carbon source, could no longer grow on that compound after sitting on a slope for several months. In other versions, instability was a regular occurrence and part of a routine laboratory practice would be to reisolate the original strain from a selective medium. Occasionally a promising sequence of publications on a particularly interesting strain became abruptly terminated due to the failure to resuscitate it from its premature functional demise.