It doesn’t add up
An important new finding by Harvard researchers indicates that cellular mutations responsible for an organism’s successful adaptation do not, when combined over time, provide as much benefit as they would individually be expected to provide. The study from the laboratory of Christopher Marx, an associate professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB), is one of two investigations with identical approaches and equivalent results that are being published in Friday’s (June 3) issue of the journal Science. The other paper comes from the lab of Tim Cooper, an assistant professor in the University of Houston’s Department of Biology and Biochemistry. Hsin-Hung Chou, a postdoctoral fellow in Marx’s lab, is the first author on the Harvard paper. Although the Harvard and Houston groups each studied a different bacterium that evolved in different conditions, the patterns they uncovered were the same: The more fit the strain was before introducing the beneficial mutation in...