It's Okay To Be Smart

Note from Joe: This isn’t really resurrecting a 500 million year old bacterium, it’s just one gene. More at the bottom …
sciencesoup:

500 Million Year Old Bacteria Resurrected
Using a technique called “paleo-experimental evolution”, Georgia Tech researchers have brought a 500 million year old gene back to life. Betül Kaçar, astrobiologist and leader of the study, was able to achieve this remarkable feat of resurrection by splicing the ancient genetic sequence with modern Escherichia coli (E. Coli) bacteria, an abundant protein found in all known cellular life. The old and the new were hybridised it to create a “chimera”—a new, combined strain of bacteria—which then reproduced and re-evolved. Initially slow to grow, it has now survived over 1,000 brief generations and allows researchers to literally see evolution in action—to observe the different evolutionary trajectories, and whether these are always repeated or whether different choices can be made to achieve a different outcome. The team at Georgia Tech reported that some strains of the hybrid actually became more robust than the original, suggesting that it made smart mutations. Interestingly, the ancient bacteria’s adaptation didn’t bring it closer to the modern E. Coli—instead, it seemed to find a new evolutionary trajectory, giving interesting insight into how life on earth could have evolved differently. We won’t be resurrecting any dinosaurs soon, but this research could help us address long-standing questions in evolutionary and molecular biology.

I was reading through the comments that some people had left on this as they reshared it, and I wanted to point a couple things out:
These bacteria are not going to kill anyone. The strains of E. coli that we use regularly in labs are harmless cousins of the dangerous ones like O157:H7 (the one that makes “deadly hamburger meat”). They have been extensively crippled by having genes deleted and modified so that they do a few things very well (like make DNA and proteins for us to test) but actually are pretty weak and harmless. I mean, you have billions of E. coli in your lower intestine right now. They were named after it (“coli” = colon). You are still alive, I am almost 100% sure of that.
This bacterium is carrying one old gene in place of a new gene. It’s not a “resurrected” bacterium. Let’s say that there’s a gene now in humans that makes brown eyes. Well, Neanderthals had brown eyes, and used a similar gene to make ‘em that way. It would be like me taking the Neanderthal brown eye gene and putting in your genome, and then seeing what happens. In this case, several of the bacterium’s other genes adapted to fit the slightly modified new one. The old gene was for the most part exactly like the new one, except for a few key shapes and differences in the protein that it ended up making. Like a key that’s just one notch off. So every protein that the bacterium uses to latch on to this one had to adapt. That’s evolution. And it happened in this little test tube over just a few months.
I put weird genes in E. coli all the time and no one’s writing articles about me! The first parts of this experiment are Molecular Biology 101. It’s the evolution part that gets interesting.
This person really needs to put gloves on before playing with bacteria. Seriously. Is there a microbiologist out there that knows what kind of media that is?
Want something extra cool? Richard Lenski of Michigan State grew out E. coli for over 18 years, and 40,000 generations, and then sequenced them to find out how they evolved along the way. That’s dedication. Evolution in a bottle, at hyper-speed.

Zoom Info

Note from Joe: This isn’t really resurrecting a 500 million year old bacterium, it’s just one gene. More at the bottom …

sciencesoup:

500 Million Year Old Bacteria Resurrected

Using a technique called “paleo-experimental evolution”, Georgia Tech researchers have brought a 500 million year old gene back to life. Betül Kaçar, astrobiologist and leader of the study, was able to achieve this remarkable feat of resurrection by splicing the ancient genetic sequence with modern Escherichia coli (E. Coli) bacteria, an abundant protein found in all known cellular life. The old and the new were hybridised it to create a “chimera”—a new, combined strain of bacteria—which then reproduced and re-evolved. Initially slow to grow, it has now survived over 1,000 brief generations and allows researchers to literally see evolution in action—to observe the different evolutionary trajectories, and whether these are always repeated or whether different choices can be made to achieve a different outcome. The team at Georgia Tech reported that some strains of the hybrid actually became more robust than the original, suggesting that it made smart mutations. Interestingly, the ancient bacteria’s adaptation didn’t bring it closer to the modern E. Coli—instead, it seemed to find a new evolutionary trajectory, giving interesting insight into how life on earth could have evolved differently. We won’t be resurrecting any dinosaurs soon, but this research could help us address long-standing questions in evolutionary and molecular biology.

I was reading through the comments that some people had left on this as they reshared it, and I wanted to point a couple things out:

These bacteria are not going to kill anyone. The strains of E. coli that we use regularly in labs are harmless cousins of the dangerous ones like O157:H7 (the one that makes “deadly hamburger meat”). They have been extensively crippled by having genes deleted and modified so that they do a few things very well (like make DNA and proteins for us to test) but actually are pretty weak and harmless. I mean, you have billions of E. coli in your lower intestine right now. They were named after it (“coli” = colon). You are still alive, I am almost 100% sure of that.

This bacterium is carrying one old gene in place of a new gene. It’s not a “resurrected” bacterium. Let’s say that there’s a gene now in humans that makes brown eyes. Well, Neanderthals had brown eyes, and used a similar gene to make ‘em that way. It would be like me taking the Neanderthal brown eye gene and putting in your genome, and then seeing what happens. In this case, several of the bacterium’s other genes adapted to fit the slightly modified new one. The old gene was for the most part exactly like the new one, except for a few key shapes and differences in the protein that it ended up making. Like a key that’s just one notch off. So every protein that the bacterium uses to latch on to this one had to adapt. That’s evolution. And it happened in this little test tube over just a few months.

I put weird genes in E. coli all the time and no one’s writing articles about me! The first parts of this experiment are Molecular Biology 101. It’s the evolution part that gets interesting.

This person really needs to put gloves on before playing with bacteria. Seriously. Is there a microbiologist out there that knows what kind of media that is?

Want something extra cool? Richard Lenski of Michigan State grew out E. coli for over 18 years, and 40,000 generations, and then sequenced them to find out how they evolved along the way. That’s dedication. Evolution in a bottle, at hyper-speed.