Similar, and even identical, mutations underlie the metabolic diversification of independently evolving populations of the bacterium Escherichia coli. Matthew Herron and Michael Doebeli at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, exposed E. coli to a mixture of glucose and acetate and found that competition for the carbon sources caused the bacteria, over about 1,200 generations, to evolve into two ecologically and metabolically different strains.
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