Triparental mating

[1] Plasmids are introduced into bacteria for such purposes as transformation, cloning, or transposon mutagenesis.

Triparental matings can help overcome some of the barriers to efficient plasmid mobilization.

Triparental mating was identified in yeasts in 1960 and then in Escherichia coli in 1962.

The introduction of the plasmid can be verified in the recipient strain in two days, making electroporation a faster and more efficient method of transformation.

Electroporation however does not work with all bacteria and is mostly limited to well-characterized model organisms.