Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 cells THOMAS DEERINCK, NCMIR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
An artificial 鈥渕inimal cell鈥 that has had all but the most essential genes stripped out can evolve just as fast as a normal cell. The finding shows that organisms can rapidly adapt, even with an unnatural genome that provides little flexibility.
鈥淚t appears there鈥檚 something about life that鈥檚 really robust,鈥 says at Indiana University in Bloomington. 鈥淲e can strip it down to just the bare essentials,鈥 he says, but that doesn鈥檛 stop evolution going to work.
Lennon and his team studied a bacterium called Mycoplasma…
