Tom Ferenci publishes in Science

What happens when an organism finds itself in a new environment? Evolutionary theory would predict that the organism adapts through mutational changes improving fitness. In experimental evolution studies, such fitness changes can be followed but it has been remarkably difficult to predict what changes and what strategies the fitter organisms adopt. In the most detailed analysis of the extent of changes in a model organism available so far, Ram Maharjan and Shona Seeto in Tom Ferenci's laboratory continued earlier work of Lucinda McRobb to describe mutations in eleven characteristics in a population of Escherichia coli growing in a glucose-limited continuous culture. The results of their work were published recently in the prestigious general science journal Science (Maharjan et al., 2006). The study detected an explosive divergence of a single clonal population after ~100 generations into essentially a collection of distinct individuals. The unexpected level of divergence in these results disproves some well-entrenched hypotheses such as the niche exclusion principle previously used to define the limits of evolutionary diversity. The redundancy in fitness strategies in an adaptive radiation has also been revealed for the first time and future studies will elucidate the molecular changes in evolved bacteria (multiple variations to global regulation, metabolic strategies, surface properties and nutrient permeability pathways). In terms of applications, understanding the rapidity and limits of bacterial diversification in defined environments is of benefit in modeling everything from infection progression to the stability of large-scale industrial fermentations.

Maharjan, R., Seeto, S., Notley-McRobb, L., and Ferenci, T. (2006) Clonal adaptive radiation in a constant environment. Science 313: 514-517.