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Can mutations add new information?
A claim I hear on stream, and the experiment that answers it.
The claim and the answer are in two different recordings. Each button loads that video at the timestamp.
A
The claim
"You can't show me one example where a bacteria has gained new information."
Line from a 6-hour stream. Speaker not attributed: auto-captions do not identify speakers.
B
The answer
Yes. One E. coli population evolved the ability to use citrate, which its ancestors could not do, after about 31,500 generations.
Redrawn from published values.
Blount ZD, Borland CZ, Lenski RE. Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli. PNAS. 2008;105(23):7899-906. doi:10.1073/pnas.0803151105