Biologists watch speciation in a laboratory flask
November 29, 2016
Molecular models of the two receptors the virus evolved to specialize on. Credit: Justin Meyer, UC San Diego
Biologists have discovered that the evolution of a new species can occur rapidly enough for them to observe the process in a simple laboratory flask.
In a month-long experiment using a virus harmless to humans, biologists working at the University of California San Diego and at Michigan State University documented the evolution of a virus into two incipient species—a process known as speciation that Charles Darwin proposed to explain the branching in the tree of life, where one species splits into two distinct species during evolution.
"Many theories have been proposed to explain speciation, and they have been tested through analyzing the characteristics of fossils, genomes, and natural populations of plants and animals," said Justin Meyer, an assistant professor of biology at UC San Diego and the first author of a study that will be published in the December 9 issue of Science. "However, speciation has been notoriously difficult to thoroughly investigate because it happens too slowly to directly observe. Without direct evidence for speciation, some people have doubted the importance of evolution and Darwin's theory of natural selection."
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-biologists-speciation-laboratory-flask.html#jCp
November 29, 2016
Molecular models of the two receptors the virus evolved to specialize on. Credit: Justin Meyer, UC San Diego
Biologists have discovered that the evolution of a new species can occur rapidly enough for them to observe the process in a simple laboratory flask.
In a month-long experiment using a virus harmless to humans, biologists working at the University of California San Diego and at Michigan State University documented the evolution of a virus into two incipient species—a process known as speciation that Charles Darwin proposed to explain the branching in the tree of life, where one species splits into two distinct species during evolution.
"Many theories have been proposed to explain speciation, and they have been tested through analyzing the characteristics of fossils, genomes, and natural populations of plants and animals," said Justin Meyer, an assistant professor of biology at UC San Diego and the first author of a study that will be published in the December 9 issue of Science. "However, speciation has been notoriously difficult to thoroughly investigate because it happens too slowly to directly observe. Without direct evidence for speciation, some people have doubted the importance of evolution and Darwin's theory of natural selection."
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-biologists-speciation-laboratory-flask.html#jCp