Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

By watching minimal cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can be too

simple to evolve. That's next.

You've learned from Quanta. Now we want to learn from you. Quanta is conducting a series of

surveys to better serve our audience. Take our podcast listener survey and you'll be

entered to win a free Quanta book, t-shirt, or tote bag. Head to quantamag.tipeform.com

backslash podcast to answer our questions or click the link in the podcast description.

About seven years ago, researchers showed that they could strip cells down to their barest fundamentals, creating a life form with the smallest genome that still allowed it to grow

and divide in the lab. But in shedding half of its genetic

load, that minimal cell also lost some of the hardiness and adaptability that natural life

evolved over billions of years. That left biologists wondering whether the reduction

might have been a one-way trip. In pruning the cells down to their bare essentials,

had they left the cells incapable of evolving because they couldn't survive a change in even one more gene?

Now we have proof that even one of the weakest, simplest, self-replicating organisms on the planet can adapt. During just 300

days of evolution in the lab, the generational equivalent of 40,000 human years, measly minimal

cells regained all the fitness they had sacrificed. A team at Indiana University recently reported

that finding in the journal Nature.

The researchers found that the cells responded to selection pressures about as well as the tiny

bacteria from which they were derived. A second research group at the University of California,

San Diego came to a similar conclusion independently. Kate Ottomala is a biochemist and assistant

...