5 Topic Commentaries

Petri Dishes, Powerful Lessons

Petri Dishes, Powerful Lessons

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  Michael Baym, PhD

  Microbial evolution; Antibiotic resistance

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  Harvard Medical School

  “What we saw suggests that evolution is not always led by the most resistant mutants,” Baym said. “Sometimes it favors the first to get there. The strongest mutants are, in fact, often moving behind more vulnerable strains. Who gets there first may be predicated on proximity rather than mutation strength.”

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  Roy Kishony, PhD

  Systems biology; Antimicrobial resistance

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  Harvard Medical School; Technion–Israel Institute of Technology

  “This project was fun and joyful throughout,” Kishony said. “Seeing the bacteria spread for the first time was a thrill. Our MEGA plate takes complex, often obscure, concepts in evolution, such as mutation selection, lineages, parallel evolution, and clonal interference, and provides a visual, seeing-is-believing demonstration of these otherwise vague ideas. It’s also a powerful illustration of how easy it is for bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics.”

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  Tami Lieberman, PhD

  Microbiome; Microbial genomics

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  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  “This is a stunning demonstration of how quickly microbes evolve,” said Lieberman, who was a graduate student in the Kishony lab at the time of the research and is now a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT. “When shown the video, evolutionary biologists immediately recognize concepts they’ve thought about in the abstract, while nonspecialists immediately begin to ask really good questions.”

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  George Q. Daley, MD, PhD

  Stem cell biology; Hematology/Oncology

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  Harvard Medical School

  “This is the first time that sperm cells made in a petri dish from embryonic stem cells have resulted in the creation of an embryo,”

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  Valeria Canto-Soler, PhD

  Ophthalmology; Stem cell biology; Retinal regeneration

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  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  “We’re well on our way toward those goals. We have defined an efficient process to direct stem cells to form a retina in the lab, just like it would in a human embryo, and we have produced large-scale, three-dimensional retinal cups in a Petri dish that could one day restore vision in diseased patients,”

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