ABSTRACT
2018 was a revolutionary year in the field of chemistry as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 to three brilliant chemists (Figure 1): Dr. Frances H. Arnold-"for the directed evolution of enzymes "; Dr. George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter (jointly)-"for the phage display of peptides and antibodies" [1]. Their phenomenal contribution in controlling the evolution of enzymes and binding proteins and using them for the benefit of humankind has revolutionized the industry and academia alike for the past few decades.
Subject(s)
Directed Molecular Evolution/history , Nobel Prize , History, 21st Century , HumansSubject(s)
Chemistry , Directed Molecular Evolution , Protein Engineering , Chemistry/history , Chemistry/trends , Directed Molecular Evolution/history , Directed Molecular Evolution/methods , Directed Molecular Evolution/trends , Evolution, Molecular , History, 20th Century , History, 21st Century , Humans , Nobel Prize , Protein Engineering/history , Protein Engineering/trends , United Kingdom , United StatesABSTRACT
We chronicle and dissect the history of the field of Experimental Microbial Evolution, beginning with work by Monod. Early research was largely carried out by microbiologists and biochemists, who used experimental evolutionary change as a tool to understand structure-function relationships. These studies attracted the interest of evolutionary biologists who recognized the power of the approach to address issues such as the tempo of adaptive change, the costs and benefits of sex, parallelism, and the role which contingency plays in the evolutionary process. In the 1980s and 1990s, an ever-expanding body of microbial, physiological and biochemical data, together with new technologies for manipulating microbial genomes, allowed such questions to be addressed in ever-increasing detail. Since then, technological advances leading to low-cost, high-throughput DNA sequencing have made it possible for these and other fundamental questions in evolutionary biology to be addressed at the molecular level.
Subject(s)
Evolution, Molecular , Genome, Microbial , Databases, Genetic/history , Directed Molecular Evolution/history , High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing/history , High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing/methods , History, 20th Century , History, 21st CenturyABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that the development of modern science is rooted in experiment. Yet for a long time, experimentation did not occupy a prominent role in history of science. With the practical turn in science studies, this has begun to change. This paper is concerned with cultures of experiment. In the first part, a suggestion is made as to how the concept of experimental culture can be used to go beyond a history of disciplines. In the second part, a particular experimental culture in the life sciences is looked at more closely. A survey is given on the changing forms of in vitro experimentation, that is, on analyzing biological functions in a test tube.
