E. coli (Wikipedia)A paper that will be published this Friday in Science shows an important study produced by a group of four Portuguese (female) scientists from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência that demonstrates that beneficial mutation in bacteria is 1000-fold higher than previously estimated.

Such adaptation has great implications as regard to antibiotic resistance and how fast such resistance is gained by the evolving bacteria.
This ease of adaption brings higher attention to how antibiotics and drugs are administered and the way this high pace evolution can play a big threat to public health.

Although this study focuses on the evolution of bacteria, it shines some light on the way mutations take place over hundreds of generations, giving some insight on investigations in other areas like cancer development.

Update: More on this paper and beneficial mutations over at Genomicron


[img: wikipedia]

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