Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2009 Feb 12;457(7231):824-9.
doi: 10.1038/nature07892.

The Beagle in a bottle

Angus Buckling  1 , R Craig Maclean, Michael A Brockhurst, Nick Colegrave
Affiliations
Review

The Beagle in a bottle

Angus Buckling et al. Nature. .

Abstract

Why infer evolution when you can watch it happen in real time? This is the basic premise of using populations of fast-replicating microorganisms in test tubes to study evolution. The approach, known as experimental evolution, has provided a way of testing many of the key hypotheses that arose from the modern evolutionary synthesis. However, details of the unnatural histories of microorganisms in test tubes can be extrapolated only so far. Potential future directions for the approach include studying microbial evolution for its own sake under the most natural conditions possible in the test tube, and testing some qualitative theories of genome evolution.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 May 23;103(21):8107-12 - PubMed
    1. Am Nat. 2000 Jan;155(1):24-35 - PubMed
    1. Environ Microbiol. 2005 May;7(5):715-22 - PubMed
    1. Infect Immun. 1996 Feb;64(2):518-23 - PubMed
    1. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Dec 10;99(25):16144-9 - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources