The Evolution of Bacteria on a “Mega-Plate” Petri Dish (Kishony Lab)

Harvard Medical School6 HN recommenders · 2016–2026
3M views · demo · evergreen · Uploaded 2016-09-09

A two-minute time-lapse from the Kishony Lab showing bacteria spreading across a giant petri dish with increasing antibiotic doses, evolving resistance as they go.

HN links it as a visually striking demonstration of evolution and antibiotic resistance happening in days.

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16 comments from Hacker News

@Retric2016 · in “Videos of Evolution in Action”

The video shows mutations in real time as bacteria grow or fail to grow in various places. [VIDEO] It's more a demonstration than experiment, but visually it's just really striking.

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@lossolo2016 · in “The Age of the Superbug Is Here”

This is an amazing video[1] from Harvard Medical School released couple of days ago showing evolution of bacteria that evolve in 10 days to become resistant to antibiotics. [1] [VIDEO]

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@sengork2017 · in “How to Avoid a Post-Antibiotic World”

For those that would like to visualise how the bacteria vs anitbiotics evolve in an experiment over 11 days, have a look at this video from Harvard: [VIDEO]

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@ramgorur2018 · in “The man who bottled evolution”

Harvard medical school did a similar experiment on fast evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics on a petri-dish. It also clearly shows the lineage of evolution. Very interesting. [VIDEO]

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@lmilcin2019 · in “Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates”

It is absolutely nowhere near evolutionary adaptive capacity. Life will not end and the world will still be there. Life's evolutionary adaptive capacity is stagerring! Just take a look at the experiment where it barely stretches muscles: [VIDEO] What I understand they mean is "Life as we know it" defined as large animals and familiar plants roughly in places where we are used to seeing them. We are looking at life with our antropocentric point of view and we basically want familiar stuff to stay the same and we don't want unfamiliar stuff to show up. We don't want things to change and that's why potential large shift in how life presents itself may be caulled as "end of the world" event, but it is not. Life doesn't care whether oceans are clean or polluted, hot or cold. It WILL adapt some way or another even if all crustaceans and fish will die because they can't adapt quickly enough to lowering pH. We should care not because life is at danger but because we are at danger. Life as we know it is a machine that supports us, let's us grow food and provides air and water and soil and climate that we need. Humans will survive for sure in one way or another even if the temperature rises by 20 degrees but what kind of life will it be and how much suffering for those that can't deal with it?

@robocat2019 · in “Bladder cancer 'attacked and killed by common cold virus'”

> Why do you think the strongest of the strong bacteria are found in hospitals? I presume you mean strong against antibiotics and sterilisation. The evolved bacteria are likely weaker along other dimensions (that are less important for survival in a hospital setting). Some evolution is compromises, improving X has cost Y. Aside: the mega-plate video is an unbelievably good demonstration of bacterial evolution: [VIDEO] especially note the tree at the end showing how many different mutations evolved.

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@estebank2020 · in “SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility”

The mitigations are effective in slowing the spread (to varying degrees, due to a multitude of factors), which in turn slow down the rate of mutation. In any case, I would expect the dispersion of the virus to follow a pattern similar to [VIDEO]

@HPsquared2021 · in “Moore's Law for Everything”

Technological innovation is a balance between diminishing returns (ever-smaller niches getting filled, ever-increasing complexity) and the occasional breakthrough which spawns further development. The visual metaphor of bacteria developing antibiotic resistance in ever-greater levels of the antibiotic, springs to mind: [VIDEO]

@woopwoop2021 · in “History as Weather”

Non-obvious is necessary to avoid appending "and also the sun rises in the east and sets in the west every day" to every prediction to get it to satisfy the other three. That a fact is observational does not make it non-scientific. I have no problem calling a description of a human cell science. I'd also add that you absolutely do not need 500 years to verify natural selection, see e.g. this video: [VIDEO]

@_vertigo2021 · in “Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta”

Honest question here, do vaccines actually reduce the chance for covid to mutate? Spitballing, I would expect a vaccine to decrease the number of total mutations that can occur but also simultaneously increase the selective pressure on the virus, increasing the chance that any mutations that improve the virus’ ability to resist the vaccine become dominant. To make an analogy, does spraying every surface in a hospital with an antibacterial solution result in no bacteria or just make it more likely to see resistant bacteria? I’d guess it’s a function of how potent the solution was and how well every last surface was coated. If you start with a 10% solution, don’t achieve full coverage and keep ramping up slowly perhaps we’ll just see something like this: [VIDEO] Agree with the rest of your post though.

@jasode2021 · in “DNA seen through the eyes of a coder”

>What are the tests? Tests == adaptation to the environment E.g. short 2 minute video showing how bacteria evolves with random mutations to produce resistance to antibiotics: [VIDEO] Likewise at a macro scale, if Earth's atmosphere becomes inhospitable because of global nuclear war or a big asteroid collision, then the new "test for life" is adapting to the radioactive dust cloud. Keep mutating across generations until survivors can thrive.

@taf22022 · in “No antibiotics worked, so this woman turned to phage scientists”

Really I feel like this has been a hot topic for at least 15 years.. for example 5 years ago this [VIDEO] was on hacker news and got a lot of discussion as I recall… Ok maybe you are right my search yielded few posts that got any traction - so maybe it was just me sharing with people I know!

@idiocrat2023 · in “It's 2023 and I still have to touch a piss soaked door handle to exit a bathroom”

Strengthens your immune system. Without exposure (playing in mud, touching other people), we are only weaker. Bio life is really complicated. Sterilization works well only to a certain degree, before becoming damaging, e.g. causing resistance. Somewhat related, here is an interesting visualization of bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. [VIDEO]

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@robocat2023 · in “A tiny genetic change inflicts old age on young kids”

Aging is one side effect of a major internal system that counteracts cancers. Most of our cells are preprogrammed to die after a certain number of replications. This is one of many systems that counteract normal genetic mutations - which can cause cancers and other side effects. By definition a cancer has to reproduce and one way of defeating cancers is for cells to die (or be killed) once they reach a number of cell reproductions. Think of a binary tree where the tree depth is the number of cell reproductions, and telomere length controls tree depth. Each time a cell reproduces it risks mutations. Stem cells are the progenitor branches, and stem cells maintain “cleaner” copies of DNA, which then become normal cells. Normal cells then reproduce a number of times before they kill themselves. We have evolved this system because it balances the shorter term harms of cancer (high cost preventing reproduction), and senescence (lower cost after reproduction). There can be no “cure” for cancer, or aging. The cure would for cancer would require some way to either cause perfect cell reproduction, or to remove (or correct) all cells with imperfect reproductions. The “cure” for aging would require a cure for cancer. If I were to invest in something myself, it would be brain transplant, since brain cancers are rare, and dealing with organ rejection seems doable, and the issue of nerve reconnection seems solvable. The main problem is finding spare bodies, which can be unethically solved f

@dennis_jeeves12023 · in “Antibiotic that does not evoke bacterial resistance”

>BTW, the "serial dilution" method name sounds to me like what is illustrated by this famous video: [VIDEO] Great video, ( if it's not fictitious)

@MontyCarloHall2026 · in “CRISPR Tech Selectively Shreds Cancer Cells, Including "Undruggable" Cancers”

>there's no "be a better/stronger cancer and spread more effectively to more hosts" No, but there is "be a better/stronger cancer cell and don't succumb to whatever therapy is killing its neighboring cells." It's exactly akin to how dosing isolated populations of bacteria with antibiotics selects for individual cells that are resistant, which then multiply and dominate [0], just like a tumor. [0] [VIDEO]