Richard Lenski

Recently a paper appeared by Ratcliff et al. (2012) entitled “Experimental evolution of mulitcellularity” and received a fair amount of press attention, including a story in the New York Times. (http://tinyurl.com/6va4fpp ) The authors discuss their results in terms of the origin of multicellularity on earth. The senior author of the paper is Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota, who was a student of Richard Lenski’s in the 1990s. The paper, published in PNAS, was edited by Lenski. The gist is as follows. The authors repeated three steps multiple times: 1) they grew single-celled yeast in a flask; 2) briefly centrifuged it; and 3) took a small amount from the bottom of the flask to seed a new culture. This Read More ›

A new paper from Richard Lenski’s group has appeared in Nature http://tinyurl.com/ygtcflq and has garnered a fair amount of press attention (for example, herehttp://tinyurl.com/yh7nqht ). Some people asked me for my thoughts about it. The new paper continues the grand experiment that Lenski has been publishing about lo these many years — allowing a culture of the bacterium E. coli to continuously grow and evolve under his close observation. The only really new thing reported is a technical improvement — these days one can have the entire genome of E. coli “re-sequenced” (that is, determine the sequence of the entire DNA of the particular E. coli you’re working with) done for an affordable cost. (There are companies which will do it for a fee.) So Lenski and collaborators had the Read More ›