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."

they damaged a gene meant to encode a protein

[circletimessquare]

this damage they inferred as meaning they took the gene back 500 million years

then the bacteria slowly repaired the damage with successive mutations, somehow meaning 500 million years of evolution had been reacquired

"some of the altered lineages actually became healthier than their modern counterpart"

meaning the typical background noise of random mutations, within or without this experiment, leads to natural variation in fitness

it's an interesting experiment, but the write up is highly contrived about what they actually did

Re:Two words.

[halfEvilTech]

Jurassic. Park.

so in other words?

What could possibly go wrong....

What about Horizontal Gene Transfer?

[eldavojohn]

From the article:

“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 [wikipedia.org] 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."

Anime has ruined me

[P-niiice]

I was expecting a huge explosion of growth that chases the scientist out of the lab, grabs his ankle with a tentacle, drags him back into the lab to infect him and give him Akira-like telekinetic power and a thirst for world rule

Re:Or ... change the "defining characteristic"

[swalve]

These are generally people who can't conceive of really big things, really small things and really long times. They think that light speed means "instantaneous". They think the WTC towers should have fallen over on their sides. They can't understand that lighter than air isn't necessarily weightless. They simply cannot imagine the timespans necessary to understand evolution. In their minds, it's an ape giving birth to George Washington.