At Michigan State University, there has been a 21 year experiment going on that distills the essence of evolution in laboratory flasks. Charles Darwin wrote the Origin of Species about 150 years ago and this was the first lead to there being an evolution.
MSU professor Richard Lenskidocument the process in their analysis of 40,000 generations of bacteria. He started out by growing cultures of fast-reproducing, single-celled E. coli bacteria in 1988.
"It's extra nice now to be able to show precisely how selection has changed the genomes of these bacteria, step by step over tens of thousands of generations," Lenski said.
Researchers have discovered 45 mutations of surviving cells. According to Darwin's theory, those mutations should have conferred some advantage, and that's exactly what the researchers found.
To read more on this story and find out what researchers hope to learn from these experiments, go t0 science daily.com
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