Time to restart the LTEE, this virus be damned

The LTEE ran for over 32 years and more than 73,000 generations, without missing a beat. Then this stupid coronavirus came along and made me shut down the lab and stop the experiment. Well, I think it’s high time for everyone to return to the lab and get back to work.

We’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time here.  The LTEE lines were frozen on March 9th.  That’s 23 days ago, for crying out loud.  Do you know how many generations have been lost?  With 100-fold daily dilution and regrowth, that’s ~6.7 generations per day.  So we’ve already lost over 150 generations. And with 12 populations that’s a net loss of more than 1,800 generations.

Another way of looking at it is that each population produces around half a billion new cells each day.  So that’s 23 x 12 x 500,000,000 cells that went missing. You get the picture, that’s a sh*t-load (a technical term for those of us who study E. coli) of baby bacteria that never got born!

I’ve gotten in enough trouble already with a certain crowd for our claim to have observed evolution. If they find out we’ve denied these adorable baby bacteria their existence, there’s no telling what letters they might send me.

Plus, speaking as a scientist, I have this premonition that something really big would have happened during those missing generations. I’ve been expecting them to evolve the ability to produce palladium from citrate. They could then use the palladium for cold fusion, which would surely get some attention. Stupid virus!

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s back to work I go.  I sure hope you have a nice day at home.

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We Interrupt this Nasty Virus with Some Good News about Bacteria

Today is the 32nd birthday of the E. coli long-term evolution experiment (LTEE).  I started it on February 24th, 1988, when I was at the University of Califonia, Irvine.

It also happens to be daily transfer number 11,000 for the experiment.  But wait, you ask: Is 365 x 32 really equal to 11,000?  (Not to mention the complication of leap years.)

No!  365 x 32 = 11,680.  We’re almost 2 years behind perfection!  Over the years, we missed daily transfers for various reasons including the fact the experiment was frozen for several months around the time of my move from Irvine to Michigan State University, as well as some missed transfers and various mishaps (including contamination) along the way that have led us to restart the experiment from frozen samples.

Luckily, we don’t have to go back to the beginning–the LTEE wouldn’t have survived if we did. We freeze whole-population samples every 75 days, and those provide the backups that keep us going when needed.

So the LTEE is 32 years old today.  The evolving bacteria lineages, though, are younger, at a little over 30 years (11,000 / 365).  I prefer to think of them as timeless, though … having survived in and adapted to their tiny flask worlds for more than 73,000 generations.

Here’s grad student and lab manager Devin Lake doing today’s transfer.

And here’s Devin & me with the lab notebook. Devin is pointing to today’s entries.

And here’s what we wrote:

For those with pathogens on their mind (and that’s a lot of us, with the new coronavirus spreading), you might wonder: Aren’t E. coli dangerous?  The short answer is only rarely. All of us have harmless or even beneficial strains of E. coli and many other bacterial species in our GI tract. The LTEE uses one of these harmless strains, one that has been studied in many labs for close to a century without problems. There are some strains of E. coli, though, that are nasty, and which are usually acquired by eating contaminated foods.  So wash your raw fruits and vegetables, cook your meats, and don’t worry about the LTEE bacteria … Just wish them a happy birthday today, and many more years of scientific discovery.