Congratulations to Alex for his paper showing that OrthoRep is compatible with many yeast strains and can encode large genetic cargos for rapid evolution! Alex’s paper also resolves early reports on how the plasmid system OrthoRep is based upon may be incompatible with respiring cells; Alex showed that this incompatibility is due to the toxin encoded on natural plasmids and not an intrinsic feature of the replication system. This work appears in ACS Synthetic Biology.