The video of my conversation with Lee Hotz of the Wall Street Journal at New York University on digital personae is now online. Blogging, podcasting, etc., etc. etc. etc. And etc. Check it out. (Warning–sound’s a little muddy. Ear phones will help.)
Originally published September 29, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Three years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts about how scientists at the University of Oregon reconstructed the 450-million-year history of a protein. You can read the posts here, here, and here. What was particularly elegant about the study was how the scientists recreated the ancestral protein as it existed over 400 million years ago, to see how it functioned. Then they pinpointed the mutations that transformed the protein, shifting it from an old function to a new one.
Recently, the scientists tried to run their experiment backwards. They tried to turn the new protein back into the old one. And they failed. In that failure, they’ve discovered something important. They argue that when it comes to evolution, you can’t go home again.
In today’s issue of the New York Times, I describe this new research, which was recently published in Nature. (Check out the web page of the lead author, Joseph Thornton, for pdf’s of all his papers on this paleoprotein project.)
Originally published September 29, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, September 28, 2009
Evolutionary biologists have long wondered if history can run backward. Is it possible for the proteins in our bodies to return to the old shapes and jobs they had millions of years ago?
Examining the evolution of one protein, a team of scientists declares the answer is no, saying new mutations make it practically impossible for evolution to reverse direction. “They burn the bridge that evolution just crossed,” said Joseph W. Thornton, a biology professor at the University of Oregon and co-author of a paper on the team’s findings in the current issue of Nature.
Continue reading “Can Evolution Run in Reverse? A Study Says It’s a One-Way Street”
Chrissy writes, “My science is microbiology, and my tattoo is serotonin with CMP, which happen to be my initials.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published September 27, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
I’m going to be in New York on Thursday evening for a talk at NYU, in my capacity as visiting scholar.
All welcome!