I just came across this paper from a few months ago reporting that the yeast in the multicellularity long-term evolution experiment have undergone a persistent whole genome duplication. That seemed pretty cool in general, and relevant to the ad infinitum discussion of whether chromosome differences can become fixed.
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Wow. That’s amazing.
But Ken Ham told me that evolution can only cause information loss—and never information increases. I guess a change from diploidy to tetraploidy is hardly worth noticing. (“So please move along, folks. Nothing to see here!”)
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The MulTEE is a space worth watching going forward.
The fact that a strong selection pressure for something other than mere growth-and-reproductive-rate is in effect in this experiment makes it very different than the LTEE with E coli.
It’s clear that this experiment does not reward genome reduction in the same way, and multiple novel adaptive phenotypes have emerged already. Among them that the yeast clusters have evolved the toughness of wood through cellular elongation and entangling, to me implies invention at the protein level. Who knows, some of these purportedly impossible protein binding spots might have evolved?
Determining their genetic basis should keep a lot of people in the lab busy for years.
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