Fig. 4

pFREE-mediated curing of selected widely used cloning vectors with either ColE1-like (red), pSC101 (green) or p15A (blue) replicons. 50 CFUs from each replicate of each target plasmid was checked for antibiotic sensitivity after 24 h of induction of the pFREE system. The percentage of plasmid-carrying cells is depicted. The pFREE plasmid was cured in all colonies tested. Curing of the target plasmids was verified by replicon PCR (Additional file 1: info S2). The bars represent mean value of three biological replicates with error-bars showing standard deviation