A 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria has been resurrected, inserted into modern-day E. coli bacteria, and grown for more than 1,000 generations. The process, called paleo-experimental evolution, “is as close as we can get to rewinding and replaying the molecular tape of life,” says scientist Betül Kaçar, a NASA astrobiology postdoctoral fellow in NASA Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).
