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Scientists Resurrect 500-Million-Year-Old Gene Inside Modern Organism
An anonymous reader writes with news that researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have taken a gene from 500-million-year-old bacteria and inserted it into modern E. coli bacteria. They then allowed the bacteria to evolve over the course of a thousand generations to see whether it would resemble its original 'evolutionary trajectory.' From the article:
"After achieving the difficult task of placing the ancient gene in the correct chromosomal order and position in place of the modern gene within E. coli, Kaçar produced eight identical bacterial strains and allowed 'ancient life' to re-evolve. This chimeric bacteria composed of both modern and ancient genes survived, but grew about two times slower than its counterpart composed of only modern genes. 'The altered organism wasn’t as healthy or fit as its modern-day version, at least initially,' said Gaucher, 'and this created a perfect scenario that would allow the altered organism to adapt and become more fit as it accumulated mutations with each passing day.' The growth rate eventually increased and, after the first 500 generations, the scientists sequenced the genomes of all eight lineages to determine how the bacteria adapted. Not only did the fitness levels increase to nearly modern-day levels, but also some of the altered lineages actually became healthier than their modern counterpart."
I was thinking "Cambrian Park."
Or more like Cambrian Petri Dish, in this case, but that's 3 words...
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“we want to know if an organism’s history limits its future and if evolution always leads to a single, defined point or whether evolution has multiple solutions to a given problem.”
I would wager it would almost have to be the latter. For example, I found it odd that the article made no mention of horizontal gene transfer and how, over 500 million years, the chance of that bacteria participating in HGT with a distantly related bacteria could have given it, say, a faster growth mechanism -- just like bacterial resistance to drugs is theorized to be a result of HGT. This is probably a useful experiment to look at one of the many mechanisms of evolution but not the entire picture of evolution nor could it effectively draw a final conclusion that "evolution always leads to a single, defined point."
My work here is dung.
>> Resurrect 500-Million-Year-Old Gene Inside Modern Organism
Or Hugh Hefner shtupping one of his models.
Well, a defining characteristic of the e. coli species is the lack of an ability to transport citrate across the cell membrane. Enough so that this is often used to differentiate e. coli from salmonella in cultures. So, evolving the ability to transport (and therefore metabolize) citrate in the lab would seem to be a pretty good example of e. coli becoming something other than e. coli (lacking one of the defining characteristics of the species).
Not only in the summary here on /. horrible, but the PR ... is even worse.
Where's the link to the peer-reviewed work? Neither in the "summary", nor in the PR.
FWIW, I don't find the purported results interesting in the slightest in their current form.
For example, how were the cells grown? (please don't say in LB in a chemostat.)
When the researchers looked closer, they noticed that every EF-Tu gene did not accumulate mutations. Instead, the modern proteins that interact with the ancient EF-Tu inside of the bacteria had mutated and these mutations were responsible for the rapid adaptation that increased the bacteria’s fitness. In short, the ancient gene has not yet mutated to become more similar to its modern form, but rather, the bacteria found a new evolutionary trajectory to adapt.
Not really repair the damage, but work around it.
Man. It's like these scientists have never even seen a horror movie.
Damn hypocrites, slicing ancient genes is ok but re-cloning Hitler and put his brain in a great white shark is suddenly over the top!
The world is only 6000 years old.