Shapiro redux: experiments with bacteria and bacteriophages (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, November 09, 2023, 21:36 (378 days ago) @ David Turell

A rapidly moving evolutionary fight:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-bacteria-virus-arms-rare-window-rapid.html

"Borin and Meyer set bacteria and viruses together in a closed laboratory flask—just two teaspoons large—to study coevolution in action. As viruses infect their bacterial neighbors, the bacteria evolve new defensive measures to repel the attacks. The viruses then counter these adaptations with their own evolutionary changes that work around the new defensive measures.

"In only three weeks, this accelerated arms race between bacteria (Escherichia coli) and viruses (bacteriophage, or "phage") results in several generations of evolutionary adaptations. The new findings, published in the journal Science, reveal the emergence of distinct evolutionary patterns.

"'In this study we show the power of evolution," said Meyer, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. "We see how coevolution between bacteria and phage drive the emergence of a highly complicated ecological network. Evolution doesn't have to be slow and gradual as Darwin thought."

***

"As bacteria and viruses adapted to each other's presence over time, two prominent repeating patterns emerged. These included nestedness, a development in which narrow interactions between bacteria and virus specialists are "nested" within a broader range of generalist interactions; and modularity, in which interactions between species form modules within specialized groups, but not between groups.

"'We were amazed to discover that our evolution experiment in tiny flasks had recapitulated the complex patterns that had been previously observed between bacteria and viruses collected at regional and transoceanic scales," said Borin."

Comment: I looked at the article itself to see if Shapiro was mentioned in the text or in the references. Strange since this fits exactly with his finding that bacteria can actively edit their DNA.