From Quanta Magazine:
Several years ago, Eric Gaucher, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, even resurrected a 700-million-year-old protein from E. coli.
Now, in a new twist on paleogenomics, Kacar has engineered that ancient protein into modern E. coli and tracked how the microbe adapted to it. The new approach, which Kacar presented yesterday at NASA’s Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago, provides a more integrated view of the mechanisms of evolution — for example, how a protein’s position in a broader network influences its rate of change or how protein networks evolve as a whole.
They seem to have a mind of their own.
Kacar then synthesized that gene and inserted it into E. coli in place of the existing version. (She dubbed the hybrid the Rip strain, after Rip Van Winkle, because the gene has awoken from a 700-million-year sleep.)
The hybrid E. coli clearly suffered from the archaic component. The hybrids grew much more slowly than their normal counterparts, producing 25 percent fewer offspring. Just as a modern laptop would run poorly if its processor were replaced with an 1980s-era computer chip, the microbes’ modern molecular machinery simply wasn’t well suited to the ancient version of the protein. That’s because EF-Tu is a hub protein, interacting with 50 or more other proteins as it carries out its function in the cell. “When we put in the ancient form, we are undoubtedly disrupting some of those interactions,” Gaucher said. The partner proteins have undergone their own evolutionary changes over the last 700 million years — they’re designed to work with the laptop’s modern components, not the outdated chip.
Unlike a computer, however, the bacteria quickly bounced back. Kacar grew the hybrids in the lab, checking their growth rates and other factors every few hundred generations. Within a couple of months — about 500 generations — the hybrid E. coli were growing as well as their modern counterparts. These survivor strains must have evolved ways to overcome the problems caused by the outdated protein. But how? More.
Maybe they never got the memo that after 700 million years, they were just supposed to some how fail?
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Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista