Submission + - Natural Selection Found in Non-Living Organisms 3
Hugh Pickens writes: "Lab Spaces reports that researchers have determined for the first time that bits of infectious protein devoid of DNA or RNA called prions are capable of Darwinian evolution. "On the face of it, you have exactly the same process of mutation and adaptive change in prions as you see in viruses," said Charles Weissmann, M.D., Ph.D. "This means that this pattern of Darwinian evolution appears to be universally active. In viruses, mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to resistance. Now, this adaptability has moved one level down – to prions and protein folding – and it's clear that you do not need nucleic acid for the process of evolution." Infectious prions are associated with some 20 different diseases in humans and animals, all of them untreatable and eventually fatal including mad cow disease and a rare human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The researchers transferred prion populations from infected brain cells to culture cells. When transplanted, cell-adapted prions developed and out-competed their brain-adapted counterparts, confirming prions' ability to adapt to new surroundings, a hallmark of Darwinian evolution. When returned to brain, brain-adapted prions again took over the population. "We know that mutation and natural selection occur in living organisms and now we know that they also occur in a non-living organism," says Weissmann. "I suppose anything that can't do that wouldn't stand much of a chance of survival.""
