Ara+3: The Red Scare
FacebookTweetPrint| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
Byrd Pinkerton interviewed Rich Lenski and Zack Blount about the motivation for the long-term evolution experiment and how it has been used to study the predictability of evolution on the Unexplainable Podcast. Episode: 12 Tiny Worlds| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
Over the last 36 years, many researchers have contributed to the LTEE by performing the daily transfers of the 12 E. coli populations. Most of us are curious by nature, and many of us (the author of this post included) can be a bit competitive. With >12,000 transfers recorded in 13 lab notebooks, we have… Read More »The LTEE Leaderboard Goes Live| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
On August 7th, we froze down the 80,000-generation* populations of the LTEE. We’re pretty sure this is both a new Olympic Record and World Record and that these E. coli have reached an all-time high in fitness in their flasks. It’s been a great team effort keeping the experiment running smoothly. There have been no… Read More »80,000 Generations: New Olympic Record| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
Austin was in the path of totality for the Great North American Eclipse. The weather was cloudy, unfortunately, but the crescent sun peeked through enough to elicit some OOHs and AAHs across the UT Austin campus. Of course, the LTEE E. coli were going about their normal business and replicating during the event, a few… Read More »LTEE Eclipsed| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
Earlier this spring, I had a fantastic visit to Tyler Junior College (TJC) and UT Tyler to give two public presentations as part of their Darwin Day events. One was focused on the long-term evolution experiment (shown below). Tyler has a long-running Darwin Day event. Many thanks to my hosts, including Brent Bill at UT… Read More »Darwin Day 2024 in Tyler, TX| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
Charles Darwin, founder of our field, and the one who made biology a real science, was born on this day in 1809, an exact birthday shared with Abraham Lincoln. Remember to think of him and all the work he did to bring us to where we are, being sure to also remember that he did… Read More »Time to Reflect on Darwin’s Birthday| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a pair of papers posted on the bioRxiv preprint website. Both papers examined the evolution of the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) in the LTEE populations, but they addressed complementary questions. One paper focused on the overall shape of the DFE as well as changes… Read More »An Update to the Changing Distribution of Fitness Effects| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
I recently had a great time discussing the long-term evolution experiment and more with Molly Bentley in an interview for an episode of the podcast Big Picture Science that focused on the evolutionary origins of multicellular life. Are E. coli in the LTEE evolving into differentiated multicellular organisms like the Volvox shown here? Probably not,… Read More »LTEE on Big Picture Science| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
There is a quote by Theodosius Dobzhansky that goes: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” In response, I wish to offer up a corollary: “Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of molecular biology and genetics.”* Building a comprehensive model of evolution requires a thorough understanding of the… Read More »Who Moved My Genes? Analyzing Chromosomal Rearrangements in the LTEE| The Long-Term Evolution Experiment
