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The Beagle in a bottle

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.

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Figure 1: The rise of experimental evolution.
Figure 2: Adaptive radiation in a heterogeneous environment.
Figure 3: Cooperation and cheating in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Figure 4: Experimental assay to show bacteriophage infecting bacteria.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Royal Society and the Leverhulme Trust for funding.

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Correspondence should be addressed to A.B. (angus.buckling@zoo.ox.ac.uk).

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Buckling, A., Craig Maclean, R., Brockhurst, M. et al. The Beagle in a bottle. Nature 457, 824–829 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07892

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