Brilliant work: Evolution in a test tube! Link:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429140849.htm

Amazing stuff here!

The link says using a self-replicating enzymatic RNA molecule in the test tube using five types of molecular "food":

“…At the beginning of the experiment each RNA could utilize all five types of food — but none of these were utilized particularly well. After hundreds of generations of evolution, however, the two molecules each became independently adapted to use a different one of the five food sources. Their preferences were mutually exclusive — each highly preferred its own food source and shunned the other molecule's food source….”

-a fascinating experiment -and one that has obvious analogies with the evolution of new species of living things in responce to a change in environment that are more specialised than their ancestral species.

A similar technique can be used to evolve now enzymes in the test tube to do useful jobs such as oxidise fuel in a fuel cell etc. found this link about this:

http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=08032407

“…they developed a method allowing the synthetic enzymes to undergo 'evolution in a test tube' that mimics natural evolution. Their method is based on repeated rounds of random mutations followed by scanning the mutant enzymes to find the ones who showed the most improvement in efficiency. These enzymes then underwent further rounds of mutation and screening. Results show that it takes only seven rounds of evolution in a test tube to improve the enzymes' efficiency 200-fold compared with the efficiency of the computer-designed template, resulting in a million-fold increase in reaction rates compared with those that take place in the absence of an enzyme….”

Originally posted by Andrew Hamilton
A similar technique can be used to evolve now enzymes in the test tube to do useful jobs such as oxidise fuel in a fuel cell etc. found this link about this:

http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=08032407

“…they developed a method allowing the synthetic enzymes to undergo 'evolution in a test tube' that mimics natural evolution. T ...[text shortened]... increase in reaction rates compared with those that take place in the absence of an enzyme….”

That is like the genetic programs that are given a goal and then little changes made and a recheck to see if they are making progress to the goal, eventually producing a piece of engineering no engineer would have thought of. BTW, that site, Sciencecentric, seems to have the same articles as science daily. Do you know if they are connected?

Originally posted by sonhouse
That is like the genetic programs that are given a goal and then little changes made and a recheck to see if they are making progress to the goal, eventually producing a piece of engineering no engineer would have thought of. BTW, that site, Sciencecentric, seems to have the same articles as science daily. Do you know if they are connected?

sorry -don’t know.