Events
Scientists in the laboratory of the Technical University of Georgia have managed to “resurrect” a bacterium that lived on our planet 500 million years ago. Although this was not exactly a resurrection from the dead, researchers actually implanted the modern bacterium E Coli in the gene of its distant ancestors. The Frankenstein microbe felt great and has passed 1000 generations since its birth.
Through their experiments, scientists want to know whether the bacterium will develop as it did in the distant past, or whether its evolution will take a completely different path and turn into a completely new organism.
The new bacterium mutates pretty quickly. Some of its representatives are becoming stronger and stronger than modern microbes. When scientists looked in more detail, they noticed that the EF-tu gene did not accumulate mutations at all. Instead, modern proteins that interacted with the ancient genome within bacteria mutated, and these mutations were responsible for rapid adaptation that made bacteria healthier and stronger.
Scientists plan to continue research that will allow them to answer a number of other questions related to evolution and molecular biology. For example, can evolution solve different problems in different ways, or does it have no choice, and the scenario will repeat itself every time.