OrbitalDawn
Ulysses Everett McGill
Link.
More in the link.
If we could somehow rewind the history of life to the dawn of the animal kingdom, it would be unlikely that we humans would ever evolve, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued. The history of life was shaped by too many flukes and contingencies to repeat its course.
Scientists can’t turn back the clock 700 million years, so we can’t know for sure whether Dr. Gould was right on that particular point. But in experiments using bacteria and other fast-breeding organisms, scientists can replay evolution many times over in their labs. And the results of a new experiment published Thursday in the journal Cell Reports demonstrate — with movies — that evolution can be astoundingly predictable.
The experiment was carried out by Joao Xavier of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and his colleagues. They studied a common species of bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These microbes live pretty much everywhere — in dirt, in water, on our skin. Under certain conditions, they also invade our bodies and cause dangerous infections. People with cystic fibrosis, for example, can get P. aeruginosa infections in their lungs, which are often impossible to eradicate.
To better understand the biology of this pathogen, Dr. Xavier began to study how it searches for food. In a process called swarming, the bacteria spray out gooey molecules that form a slippery carpet; they can then slither over it by whipping their tails, devouring food they encounter along the way.
“I just wondered why nobody had filmed them before, because the pattern is so striking,” said Dr. Xavier. He dropped a few hundred microbes in the middle of a petri dish laced with sugar and switched on a camera overhead.
*Video*
To better understand how the bacteria swarm, Dr. Xavier and his colleagues allowed them to evolve. They seeded petri dishes with a few hundred microbes and gave them a day to swarm and reproduce. The next day, they drew a small sample of the bacteria from the dishes and used them to seed new ones.
The scientists reasoned that, with each generation, new mutations would arise from time to time. If a mutation helped bacteria thrive in this new environment, it might become more common because of natural selection.
And so it did.
Within a few days, the evolution of the bacteria took a dramatic turn. The bacteria became 25 percent faster than their ancestors — Dr. Xavier dubbed them “hyperswarmers.” A movie of hyperswarmers starkly illustrates how different they had become, able to fill up the entire dish.
More in the link.
