What makes bacteria particularly useful in the study of evolution?
Bacteria are wonderful for studying evolution for several reasons. The most obvious one, and the one that attracted me from switching many, many years ago from working on insects to working on bacteria is they reproduce so quickly. I have a project that’s been going on for about 20 years in the lab and during that time, the E. coli we study have gone through over 45,000 generations. So, it’s possible to actually watch evolution in action in the laboratory under controlled settings using E. coli. What breakthroughs have you had in your bacteriological research? One that got a lot of attention last year was that our bacteria in the flask that I just showed you, they’re growing on a sugar, a very familiar sugar, called glucose but throughout these tens of thousands of generations, we had another source of energy that, in principle, bacteria can use, a certain species of bacteria can use but E. coli is a species that’s unable to grow on this other carbon source, which is called citrate, an
