Let me tell you a little bit about a true evolution experiment and you will ask why do you do... why do you make experiments when you know the mechanisms... all well...? You cannot calculate what is the product of evolution. It's so complicate, and I will tell you a story of an experiment we did here. It was done by a student... the experimental work was done by a student in his PhD thesis, Günther Strunk. It had to use a machine because the replication time in this... we optimised our conditions so that the total replication of an RNA strength took less than a minute. So everything had to go with the machine controlled and we used Spiegelman's technique of serial transfer.
[Q] But maybe you should... who built the machine? I remember these were doctoral theses, diploma work, so they must have...
Oh yes, it was an electrical engineer who did a doctor thesis in electrical engineering here, Hajo Otten, and then other people worked together with him. Günter Bauer worked on that machine, and finally Günter Strunk and Rolf Günther... ja, he did the latest...
[Q] ... more sophisticated...
... more sophisticated parallel machines. Now let me explain this machine. The reaction vessel is a little silver plate, it has a little deepening which takes up a few microlitre of substance. Now, first surprise, our enzyme didn't like silver, like certain ladies prefer gold over silver - so did our enzyme. We had to make a gold inlet in order to persuade the enzyme to work, but that it did beautifully in the gold vessel. Why did we take silver plate? Well I said you let it grow then you stop the reaction, take a tenth out of it, let it grow, stop the reaction. And we start and stop the reaction by a temperature jump. We simply put the silver plate, if it is not growing at 0°C, and when it is supposed to grow it is pushed on to a metal block which is 37°C or above 30°C... then in a second it assumes that temperature, starts to grow. We watch it with a laser over a glass fibre optics. The laser measures the fluorescence of these samples. The fluorescence tells us about the amount of RNA produced. And when a certain amount was produced we stopped the reaction, take an aliquot out and start the next series... and Günther Strunk did this experiment.
