2023-07-17 04:00:15
Even with minimal genes, life finds a way to evolve. This discovery was made by evolutionary biologist Jay T. Lennon and his team, changing our understanding of evolution and presenting new perspectives for medical research (Medical research is divided into basic and clinical research.).
Jay T. Lennon’s team studied an artificial minimal cell, stripped of everything except its essential genes. They found that this purified cell can evolve as quickly as a normal cell, demonstrating the ability of organisms to adapt, even with a genome. ..) unnatural not very flexible.
Electron micrograph of a cluster of minimal cells magnified 15,000 times. The synthetically simplified bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides, contains less than 500 genes.
Credit: Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman of the National Center for Imaging and Microscopy Research at the University of California, San Diego.
For their study, Lennon’s team used the synthetic organism Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn3B, a minimized version of the bacterium M. mycoides, common in the gut of goats and other similar animals. Researchers at the Institute (An institute is a permanent organization created for a certain purpose. It is…) J. Craig Venter in California have reduced the genome of M. mycoides to the whole (In set theory, a set intuitively designates a minimal collection…) of genes required for autonomous cellular life.
“Every gene in its genome is essential,” Lennon says of M. mycoides JCVI-syn3B. “You would think that there is no leeway for mutations, which could limit its evolutionary potential.” But the team found that M. mycoides JCVI-syn3B actually has an exceptionally high mutation rate.
Electron micrograph of a cluster of minimal cells magnified 15,000 times. The synthetically simplified bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides, contains less than 500 genes.
Credit: Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman of the National Center for Imaging and Microscopy Research at the University of California, San Diego.
The researchers allowed the organism to evolve freely in the lab for 300 days, the equivalent of 2,000 bacterial generations or about 40,000 years of human evolution. They then set up experiments to see how the evolved minimal cells performed in comparison to non-minimal M. mycoides and a strain of minimal cells that hadn’t evolved for 300 days.
They found that the non-minimal bacterium easily outperformed the unevolved minimal version. However, the minimal bacterium that had evolved for 300 days did much better, regaining all the fitness it had lost due to genome simplification.
Understanding how organisms with simplified genomes overcome evolutionary challenges has important implications for long-standing problems in biology. The research (Scientific research designates in the first place all the actions taken with a view to…) of Lennon and his team demonstrates the power of natural selection (In biology, natural selection is one of the mechanisms that guides evolution…) to rapidly optimize fitness (Physics (from the Greek φυσις, nature) is etymologically the…) in the simplest self-contained organism, with implications for the evolution of complexity (Complexity is a notion used in philosophy, epistemology (by…) cellular.
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