Bacteria caught evolving a major new ability.
An evolutionary biologist has watched a colony of E. coli evolve a stunning new capability, right in the lab. He let a single bacterium reproduce for 44,000 generations in twelve populations. It was just one of the populations that, around the 31,500th generation, suddenly developed the ability to metabolize citrate, thus doubling its available food sources. As a result, these mutants thrived in comparison to the other eleven populations. Cooler still, he saved samples from every 500th generation, so now he’s going back and replaying the process over and over again, to find out how they evolved it and how likely that it was to take place. Next time somebody tells you that “nobody’s ever observed evolution,” tell ‘em to stick this in their pipe and smoke it. (Via /.)
2 Comments