Health & Medicine
Stunning Video Of Evolution Will Leave You Breathless, Watch
Brooke James
First Posted: Sep 09, 2016 09:38 AM EDT
Zombie and dystopian films are very popular nowadays, mainly because people love stories of strength and survival. Like any other film in these genre, the cast start getting whittled down over the course of the film, but new skills leave the best to survive.
It's also Charles Darwin's theory on evolution, but the film is shorter, with tinier cast of characters: bacteria in a massive petri dish. For a study made by Harvard, they set a large acrylic dish four feet wide and two feet across, and filled it with agar jelly that contains antibiotic in various levels. The outermost sections are antibiotic-free, while the center is chock-full of the drugs.
A the start of the video, the bacteria are dropped onto the edges of the dish, and they soon colonized their zone. However, when they first hit the antibiotic wall, their progress was halted - for a while anyway. Some resistant bacteria managed to pick up mutations and allowed them to shrug off the drug and advance closer to the center until they hit the next zone. The same thing happened: a slight hitch, and they colonize yet again.
While this is a short video, it does represent a very real problem: disease causing virus and bacteria are evolving to resist drugs, and according to The Atlantic, by 2050, impervious infections could potentially kill up to ten million people a year. These drug-resistant infections are also generally invisible to the naked eye, which means that it gets harder and harder to visualize their progress.
The experiment, called the MEGA-plate (Microbial Evolution and Growth Arena) shows how easily and readily bacteria can get immune to medicines. However, the video finally showed us how vacteria can evolve in realistic three-dimensional spaces. "It is very exciting and takes us much closer to the real thing," Pamela Yeh, a scientist from the University of California in Los Angeles said.
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First Posted: Sep 09, 2016 09:38 AM EDT
Zombie and dystopian films are very popular nowadays, mainly because people love stories of strength and survival. Like any other film in these genre, the cast start getting whittled down over the course of the film, but new skills leave the best to survive.
It's also Charles Darwin's theory on evolution, but the film is shorter, with tinier cast of characters: bacteria in a massive petri dish. For a study made by Harvard, they set a large acrylic dish four feet wide and two feet across, and filled it with agar jelly that contains antibiotic in various levels. The outermost sections are antibiotic-free, while the center is chock-full of the drugs.
A the start of the video, the bacteria are dropped onto the edges of the dish, and they soon colonized their zone. However, when they first hit the antibiotic wall, their progress was halted - for a while anyway. Some resistant bacteria managed to pick up mutations and allowed them to shrug off the drug and advance closer to the center until they hit the next zone. The same thing happened: a slight hitch, and they colonize yet again.
While this is a short video, it does represent a very real problem: disease causing virus and bacteria are evolving to resist drugs, and according to The Atlantic, by 2050, impervious infections could potentially kill up to ten million people a year. These drug-resistant infections are also generally invisible to the naked eye, which means that it gets harder and harder to visualize their progress.
The experiment, called the MEGA-plate (Microbial Evolution and Growth Arena) shows how easily and readily bacteria can get immune to medicines. However, the video finally showed us how vacteria can evolve in realistic three-dimensional spaces. "It is very exciting and takes us much closer to the real thing," Pamela Yeh, a scientist from the University of California in Los Angeles said.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone