Topic summary
Directed mutagenesis
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Adaptive mutation.
Lactose starvation
Later support for this hypothesis came from Susan Rosenberg, then at the University of Alberta, who found that an enzyme involved in DNA recombinational repair, recBCD, was necessary for the directed mutagenesis observed by Cairns and colleagues in 1989. The directed mutagenesis hypothesis was challenged in 2002, by work showing that the phenomenon was due to general hypermutability due to selected gene amplification, followed by natural selection, and was thus a standard Darwinian process. Later research from 2007 however, concluded that amplification could not account for the adaptive mutation and that "mutants that appear during the first few days of lactose selection are true revertants that arise in a single step".