Strains were regularly recovered from the original glycerol stocks for preparing inocula for the experiments (under non-selective pressure). Comparing with other reports of adaptive laboratory evolution the most similar previous report would be that by Stanley, Fraser, et al. (2010), except they maintained a low dilution rate and modulated the selective pressure by modifying ethanol content in the feed, while we used a faster dilution rate and modulated the selective pressure by increasing the dilution rate. The feasibility of the relatively high dilution rates in the presence of ethanol in our experiment may be related with the genotype of the industrial strains we used, and the fact they are naturally adapted to ethanol.