{"id":1863,"date":"2021-08-11T21:07:47","date_gmt":"2021-08-11T21:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=1863"},"modified":"2021-08-11T21:07:47","modified_gmt":"2021-08-11T21:07:47","slug":"how-will-the-coronavirus-evolve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=1863","title":{"rendered":"How Will the Coronavirus Evolve?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Authors: By\u00a0Dhruv Khullar<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


In 1988, Richard Lenski, a thirty-one-year-old biologist at UC Irvine, started an experiment. He divided a population of a common bacterium, E. coli,<\/em> into twelve flasks. Each flask was kept at thirty-seven degrees Celsius, and contained an identical cocktail of water, glucose, and other nutrients. Each day, as the bacteria replicated, Lenski transferred several drops of each cocktail to a new flask, and every so often he stored samples away in a freezer. His goal was to understand the mechanics of evolution. How quickly, effectively, creatively, and consistently do microorganisms improve their reproductive fitness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenski\u2019s flasks produced about six new generations of E. coli<\/em> a day; the bacteria woke up as babies and went to bed as great-great-great-grandparents. In this way, Lenski and his team have studied more than seventy thousand generations of E. coli<\/em> over thirty-three years. Compared with their distant ancestors, the latest versions of the bacterium reproduce seventy per cent faster; it once took them an hour to double their ranks, but now they can do it in less than forty minutes. Different populations have taken different paths to enhanced fitness, but, after decades, most have arrived at reproduction rates within a few percentage points of one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenski\u2019s Long-Term Evolution Experiment, or L.T.E.E., as it\u2019s called, has yielded fundamental insights into the mutational capabilities of microorganisms. For his work, Lenski, now in his sixties and at Michigan State University, has received a MacArthur \u201cgenius\u201d grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. \u201cI\u2019m not sure I can tell you how it\u2019s affected my thinking, because I\u2019m not sure I can conceive of being in this field without this experiment existing,\u201d Michael Baym, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard Medical School, recently told Discover<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three of the experiment\u2019s key findings are especially relevant today. The first is that, in general, there were diminishing returns to mutation over time: the bacteria made many of their most reproductively advantageous moves early on. A second finding, however, was that the bacteria never stopped getting fitter. Seventy thousand generations in, they\u2019re still finding new ways to improve, albeit at a somewhat slower rate. \u201cI had sort of imagined that things would have flatlined,\u201d Lenski told me recently, when we spoke over Zoom. \u201cBut there seem to be endless possibilities for tinkering and progress. If there is a hard limit, it\u2019s so, so far away that it\u2019s impractical to consider on an experimental timescale\u2014maybe even a geological timescale.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For More Information: https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/science\/annals-of-medicine\/how-will-the-coronavirus-evolve<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Authors: By\u00a0Dhruv Khullar In 1988, Richard Lenski, a thirty-one-year-old biologist at UC Irvine, started an experiment. He divided a population of a common bacterium, E. coli, into twelve flasks. Each flask was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,156,346],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-covid-19","category-evolution","category-mutations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}