Science: A New Step In Evolution
Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 7:43:21 pm PDT
Carl Zimmer has a fascinating post at The Loom (part of the ScienceBlogs network), with more details on that 20-year experiment in evolution conducted by Richard Lenski at Michigan State University: A New Step In Evolution.
Based on what scientists already knew about evolution, Lenski expected that the bacteria would experience natural selection in their new environment. In each generation, some of the microbes would mutate. Most of the mutations would be harmful, killing the bacteria or making them grow more slowly. Others would be beneficial allowing them to breed faster in their new environment. They would gradually dominate the population, only to be replaced when a new mutation arose to produce an even fitter sort of microbe.
Lenski used a simple but elegant method to find out if this would happen. He froze some of the original bacteria in each line, and then froze bacteria every 500 generations. Whenever he was so inclined, he could go back into this fossil record and thaw out some bacteria, bringing them back to life. By putting the newest bacteria in his lines in a flask along with their ancestors, for example, he could compare how well the bacteria had adapted to the environment he had created.
Over the generations, in fits and starts, the bacteria did indeed evolve into faster breeders. The bacteria in the flasks today breed 75% faster on average than their original ancestor. Lenski and his colleagues have pinpointed some of the genes that have evolved along the way; in some cases, for example, the same gene has changed in almost every line, but it has mutated in a different spot in each case. Lenski and his colleagues have also shown how natural selection has demanded trade-offs from the bacteria; while they grow faster on a meager diet of glucose, they’ve gotten worse at feeding on some other kinds of sugars.
Last year Lenski was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This week he is publishing an inaugural paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with his student Zachary Blount and postdoc Christina Borland. Lenski told me about the discovery behind the paper when I first met him a few years ago. He was clearly excited, but he wasn’t ready to go public. There were still a lot of tests to run to understand exactly what had happened to the bacteria.
Now they’re sure. Out of the blue, their bacteria had abandoned Lenski’s their glucose-only diet and had evolved a new way to eat.
After 33,127 generations Lenski and his students noticed something strange in one of the colonies. The flask started to turn cloudy. This happens sometimes when contaminating bacteria slip into a flask and start feeding on a compound in the broth known as citrate. Citrate is made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; it’s essentially the same as the citric acid that makes lemons tart. Our own cells produce citrate in the long chain of chemical reactions that lets us draw energy from food. Many species of bacteria can eat citrate, but in an oxygen-rich environment like Lenski’s lab, E. coli can’t. The problem is that the bacteria can’t pull the molecule in through their membranes. In fact, their failure has long been one of the defining hallmarks of E. coli as a species.
If citrate-eating bacteria invade the flasks, however, they can feast on the abundant citrate, and their exploding population turns the flask cloudy. This has only happened rarely in Lenski’s experiment, and when it does, he and his colleagues throw out the flask and start the line again from its most recently frozen ancestors.
But in one remarkable case, however, they discovered that a flask had turned cloudy without any contamination. It was E. coli chowing down on the citrate. The researchers found that when they put the bacteria in pure citrate, the microbes could thrive on it as their sole source of carbon.
In nature, there have been a few reports of E. coli that can feed on citrate. But these oddballs all acquired a ring of DNA called a plasmid from some other species of bacteria. Lenski selected a strain of E. coli for his experiments that doesn’t have any plasmids, there were no other bacteria in the experiment, and the evolved bacteria remain plasmid-free. So the only explanation was that this one line of E. coli had evolved the ability to eat citrate on its own.
