Rapid mining of (meta)genomic biodiversity by repurposing CRISPRi for positive selection

The global microbiota contains an enormous, previously inaccessible reservoir of biodiversity that can now be captured as large DNA fragments in clone libraries. To mine cloned biodiversity more effectively, we developed a CRISPR-interference-based counter-selection interruption circuit for the high-throughput retrieval of desired clones within complex libraries.