In this video (midway down the page), you can see white bacteria, in giant blocks of black agar, rapidly evolve to tolerate extremely lethal concentrations of anti-biotics!
“. . . it’s an uncommonly powerful visualization of evolution, and its role in the rise of superbugs. It also gives biologists a tool to better analyze how those superbugs develop. From the sound of it, this video is the first of many. “We plan on mapping all the different ways bacteria can become resistant, and using this to develop diagnostic tools that can foresee the future,” Kishony says. With that, physicians might learn more about how these pathogens evolve—and what we can do to stop them.”
The real-time involved was 11 days … with high-speed photography that animates real life in just seconds. The giant petri blocks were developed for Hollywood’s movie, “Contagion”… and only now is this technology being exploited to watch evolution in meaningfully compressed blocks of time!
