http://www.biologicinstitute.org/post/32246480851/innovation-or-renovation Innovation or Renovation?
By Ann Gauger
When is an innovation not an innovation? If by innovation you mean the evolution of something new, a feature not present before, then it would be stretching it to call the trait described by Blount et al. in “Genomic analysis of a key innovation in an experimental Escherichia coli population” an innovation.
In his paper in Quarterly Review of Biology, Dr. Michael Behe pointed out that E. coli was already capable of using citrate for anaerobic growth (when no oxygen was available). He postulated that a change in gene regulation could turn on citrate transport and permit growth on citrate under aerobic conditions.
After an enormous amount of work, having sequenced the genomes of many clones along the lineages that led to the ability to use citrate, as well as lineages that never did, and testing the phenotypes of identified mutations, Blount et al. have now reported that Behe was largely right. The key innovation was a shift in regulation of the citrate operon, caused by a rearrangement that brought it close to a new promoter.
That pretty much sum's it up.
however , if someone were to reproduce the experiment again and get the same results , they will probably be on the lookout for this loss of function , so the experiment has
shown that bacteria can regain a lost ability to metabolize a previously metabolized nutrient through loss of function.
this could be a very important adaptation.
possibly more important to mankind than any proof of
evolution would have ever dreamed of.
