SoylentNews

MrPlow inform us of a link:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

If there's one thing life is good at, it's adapting to new environments, but that's not always a good thing. Bacteria are fast adapting to antibiotics, rendering drugs less and less effective and threatening to cast us back into the dark ages of medicine. Now a research project backed by the European Union is trying to turn that same process to our advantage, with an "evolution machine" that directs the evolution of bacteria by making changes to their environment, guiding them to produce molecules that could one day lead to new drugs.

The evolution machine, dubbed EVOPROG, was developed as part of the European Union's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative. The system contains bioreactors full of mixed bacteria species and bacteriophages – viruses that attack bacteria and change their DNA, which in this case makes them produce molecules with certain functions.

[...] Phages are some of the fastest-evolving organisms, so to make EVOPROG work the scientists engineered them to function like biological versions of the "IF/THEN" statements that are key to programming. Here they've been designed so that "IF" a certain change is artificially introduced into their environment, "THEN" they attach themselves to a certain type of bacteria (which have also been carefully engineered) to produce molecules. Like natural evolution, the most effective phages are then selected for and allowed to replicate.

Source: Unnatural selection: The "evolution machine" that drives bacteria to produce new drugs

Original Submission