FYI, the first author of a paper we read several weeks ago is giving a talk in the Biology department about that study today. Here are the details: Thursday, February 25, 2010, General Biology Seminar, 4:00 PM, Norman Davidson Hall, 119 Kerckhoff, Jeffrey Barrick ,Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
Michigan State University "Genome dynamics during a 20-year Evolution Experiment with E. coli"

I'm still thinking about how fitness was measured in the paper we discussed morning (Barrick et al 2009). I still haven't found an explanation for how they did it, but I did read an interesting approach for measuring fitness in the paper from Chris Marx's lab I just posted. They actually pitted two strains against each other in the same culture to see which could out compete the other: "Briefly, after one round of acclimation, test strains and a reference strain expressing the yellow fluorescent protein Venus were mixed by a 1:1 volume ratio, diluted 1:64 into 9.6 ml of fresh media which were incubated under the conditions described above. The ratios of non-fluorescent cells in mixed populations were measured by passing population sample ... read more