One major goal of evolutionary biologists is to determine how certain characteristics of organisms can influence their rates of adaptation and subsequent pattern of evolutionary change. One such characteristic is the overall complexity of an organism. In order to address how complexity influences evolutionary diversification, bacterial populations were evolved in the lab either with or without selection for the ability to make spores, which are complex structures. One measure of complexity is how many traits are maintained by the organism, and this can be examined by looking at the contents of the genome. Changes in genome content will be examined in these bacterial populations to detect large changes in gene organization, including the loss or duplication of genes. Studying these gains and losses of genetic material will have important implications for our understanding of the speed and mode of evolutionary adaptation in all life forms. The results of these experiments will have important implications for our understanding of how complexity affects adaptive evolution and rates of evolutionary change. This information is very important for our view of interactions between fast-evolving pathogens and their host organisms.
