Bacteriophage Experimental Evolution

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Experimental evolution studies are a means of testing evolutionary theory under carefully designed, reproducible experiments.

Although theoretically any organism could be used for experimental evolution studies, those with rapid generation times, high mutation rates, large population sizes, and small sizes increase the feasibility of experimental studies in a laboratory context.

For these reasons, bacteriophages (i.e. viruses that infect bacteria) are especially favored by experimental evolutionary biologists.

Bacteriophages, and microbial organisms, can be frozen in stasis, facilitating comparison of evolved strains to ancestors.

Additionally, microbes are especially labile from a molecular biologic perspective.

Many molecular tools have been developed to manipulate the genetic material of microbial organisms, and because of their small genome sizes, sequencing the full genomes of evolved strains is trivial.

Therefore, comparisons can be made for the exact molecular changes in evolved strains during adaptation to novel conditions.