We've been running this evolutionary experiment with Unix/Linux/OpenWRT/... for the past 50 years, and the outcome is clear: it is nearly impossible to come up with a mechanism that enforces small DNA/RNA/kernel size. Or to flip this around, the marginal cost of adding additional "functionality" -- especially functionality that is executed only occasionally (i.e., small *dynamic* cost) -- is almost free. Nature has apparently come to the same conclusion: functionality that hasn't been extensively used for 1,000 generations still remains more- or-less functional in humans today. Thus, it is likely that bacteria & viruses trapped in the Siberian permafrost for 50,000 to 100,000 years will still find humans reasonably resistant. Good example: the indigenous Americans were cut off from Europeans for at least 10,000 and possibly as much as 20,000 years. Yes, Columbus brought over diseases that likely wiped out 60-80% of indigenous Americans. Nevertheless, these diseases didn't wipe them *all* out. (I don't recall specifically, but I think the indigenous Americans gave Columbus & the other explorers some diseases that Europeans hadn't seen for quite a while, as well.) <shields up for incoming flack> At 10:38 AM 5/12/2016, Allan Wechsler wrote:
A very late reply to this interesting thread. I am curious to know whether any biologists have tried letting evolution do this work: that is, breed some well-understood model organism (almost certainly E. coli K12 or something similar) and select for small genome. I think genome size can be easily calculated by electrophoresis. This ought to be easy to mechanize, and with a generation time of 17 minutes I suspect that evolution would start whittling away at the 4.6 Mbp genome pretty quickly. Leave it running for a few months and see how close it can get to this 531 Kbp goal line. I have a sneaking suspicion that it would surprise us.
2016-03-27 13:02 GMT-04:00 Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com>:
http://www.livescience.com/54165-artificial-bacterium-has-smallest-genome.ht...
531K base pairs.