Explore the fundamental role of microbes in the natural history of our planet…
Inspired by a 2009 colloquium on microbial evolution convened at the Galapagos Islands, Microbes and Evolution continues to celebrate Charles Darwin and his landmark book On the Origin of Species. Through this collection of 40 first-person essays written by microbiologists with a passion for evolutionary biology, you’ll come to understand how their thinking and career paths in science were influenced by Darwin’s seminal work.
The essays in Microbes and Evolution explore how the evidence of microbial evolution deeply and personally affected each scientist. Prepare to be surprised and delighted with their views on the importance of evolutionary principles in the study of a variety of aspects of life science, from taxonomy, speciation, adaptation, social structure, and symbiosis to antibiotic resistance, genetics and genomics.
Table of Contents
Contents
Contributors ··
Preface ··
Introduction Darwin and Microbiology 1
Roberto Kolter and Stanley Maloy
Chapter 1 Evolution in Action: A 50,000-Generation Salute to Charles Darwin 9
Richard E. Lenski
Chapter 2 Minimal Genomes and Reducible Complexity 17
Andrés Moya
Chapter 3 Lady Lumps’s Mouthguard 25
Jessica Green
Chapter 4 Trying To Make Sense of the Microbial Census 31
Mitchell L. Sogin
Chapter 5 The View from Below 37
Margaret Riley and Robert Dorit
Chapter 6 Running Wild with Antibiotics 43
Roberto Kolter
Chapter 7 Antibiotic Resistance 49
Diarmaid Hughes
Chapter 8 Bacteria Battling for Survival 59
Thomas M. Schmidt
Chapter 9 Phage: An Important Evolutionary Force Darwin Never Knew 65
Forest Rohwer
Chapter 10 The Struggle for Existence: Mutualism 71
Paul E. Turner
Chapter 11 The Secret Social Lives of Microorganisms 77
Kevin R. Foster
Chapter 12 Microbes and Microevolution 85
Evgeni Sokurenko
Chapter 13 Unnecessary Baggage 93
Stanley Maloy and Guido Mora
Chapter 14 Bacterial Adaptation: Built-In Responses and Random Variations 99
Josep Casadesús
Chapter 15 The Impact of Differential Regulation on Bacterial Speciation 109
Eduardo A. Groisman
Chapter 16 An Accidental Evolutionary Biologist: GASP, Long-Term Survival, and Evolution 115
Steven E. Finkel
Chapter 17 How Bacteria Revealed Darwin’s Mistake (and Got Me To Read On the Origin of Species) 123
John R. Roth
Chapter 18 The Role of Conjugation in the Evolution of Bacteria 133
Fernando de la Cruz
Chapter 19 Do Bacteria Have Sex? 139
Rosemary J. Redfield
Chapter 20 Better than Sex 145
Harald Brüssow
Chapter 21 Darwin in My Lab: Mutation, Recombination, and Speciation 151
Miroslav Radman
Chapter 22 Sexual Difficulties 159
Howard Ochman
Chapter 23 Unveiling Prochlorococcus: The Life and Times of the Ocean’s Smallest Photosynthetic Cell 165
Sallie W. Chisholm
Chapter 24 Deciphering the Language of Diplomacy: Give and Take in the Study of the Squid-Vibrio Symbiosis 173
Margaret McFall-Ngai and Ned Ruby
Chapter 25 The Tangled Banks of Ants and Microbes 181
Cameron R. Currie
Chapter 26 Microbial Symbiosis and Evolution 191
Nancy A. Moran
Chapter 27 Coevolution of Helicobacter pylori and Humans 197
Martin J. Blaser
Chapter 28 The Library of Maynard-Smith: My Search for Meaning in the Protein Universe 203
Frances H. Arnold
Chapter 29 In Pursuit of Billion-Year-Old Rosetta Stones 209
Dianne K. Newman
Chapter 30 The Deep History of Life 217
Andrew H. Knoll
Chapter 31 A Glimpse into Microevolution in Nature: Adaptation and Speciation of Bacillus simplex from “Evolution Canyon” 225
Johannes Sikorski
Chapter 32 On the Origin of Bacterial Pathogenic Species by Means of Natural Selection: A Tale of Coevolution 233
Philippe J. Sansonetti
Chapter 33 The Evolution of Diversity and the Emergence of Rules Governing Phenotypic Evolution 241
Paul B. Rainey
Chapter 34 The Christmas Fungus on Christmas Island 251
Anne Pringle
Chapter 35 A New Age of Naturalists 255
Rachel A. Whitaker
Chapter 36 The Ship That Led to Shape 263
Kevin D. Young
Chapter 37 Postphylogenetics 269
W. Ford Doolittle
Chapter 38 Irreducible Complexity? Not! 275
David F. Blair and Kelly T. Hughes
Chapter 39 Many Challenges to Classifying Microbial Species 281
Stephen Giovannoni