While the DI write books

[Art (Arthur Hunt)]

Check out the top of p.9 in the linked pdf file:

2021%20HFSP%20Research%20Grants.pdf

[Art (Arthur Hunt)]

Related news release:

UNSW researcher awarded $1.8m international life science grant

An excerpt:

Dr Baker’s project How life got moving: reconstructing and re-evolving the bacterial flagellar motor, piece-by-piece aims to estimate what an ancient flagellar motor – the tiny rotating wheel that powers the swimming movement of bacteria – might have looked like, and then re-engineer it for further experimentation and research.

“The bacterial flagellar motor moves bacteria to places where the environment suits them better,” Dr Baker says. “It does this under the control of a sensory system in which receptors on the outside of the bacteria respond to changing nutrient concentrations in its environment.

“By studying the flagellar motor, we’ve discovered that its building blocks are found in many other bacterial systems, serving functions other than motion – including secretion, and energy storage and release. This allows us to investigate what conditions force the flagellar motor to adapt, and helps us understand how complex nanomachines, like the bacterial flagellar motor, can develop new functions over time.”

[John_Harshman]

Love to see the proposal.

[Tim]

I was chuffed to see that Nick Matzke was both involved in this project and in NZ.

[Giltil (Gilbert Thill)]

So would I. In particular, I would be very interested to know what in their title the authors mean by « re-evolving the bacterial flagellar motor ». I hope they don’t mean « re-engineering » as Louise Templeton says in the press release, for in that case the title would be very misleading.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

This should be interesting. I wonder what exactly is meant by the proposal to re-evove it step by step.

[Faizal_Ali]

Not to worry. The DI has itself covered:

3. The Law of Reproducible Results : Anything found in nature was Designed, unless it can be reproduced in the lab. Corollary: Anything intentionally done in a lab is not natural; it’s a purposeful result. Therefore, all lab results are evidence of Intelligent Design.

The Ten Laws of Creationism

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@Giltil

So would I. In particular, I would be very interested to know what in their title the authors mean by « re-evolving the bacterial flagellar motor ». I hope they don’t mean « re-engineering » as Louise Templeton says in the press release, for in that case the title would be very misleading.

I don’t know but my guess is that they intend to do ancestor reconstruction of several different states in the evolution of the flagellum (the “re-engineering” part), and then from those inferred ancestral systems try to re-evolve descendant systems with new functions.

I see Matzke is already co-author with Baker on a paper using that approach to understand how ion-selectivity evolves (how the flagellum can evolve by mutations and selection to switch between sodium ions, or protons, to power movement):

Ancestral Sequence Reconstructions of MotB Are Proton-Motile and Require MotA...

[evograd (Blogging Graduate Student)]

They’re not the only ones, either:

Georg Hochberg (KaHochberg)

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Faizal_Ali

The Law of Reproducible Results : Anything found in nature was Designed, unless it can be reproduced in the lab. Corollary: Anything intentionally done in a lab is not natural; it’s a purposeful result. Therefore, all lab results are evidence of Intelligent Design.

Gotta love Curmie!

An ID proponent (we’ve seen him hear) once discounted a paper reproducing IC in the lab because it was a designed experiment. Maximal palm/face intersection occurred.

[Tim]

More on this (Beeby, Hochberg, et al) effort here:

Team investigating the evolution of bacterial ‘tails’ wins prestigious grant...

(Hat tip: Panda’s Thumb here.)

I’m chuffed to note that this research also has a NZ connection: “Craig Cary (University of Waikato, New Zealand).”