Genetic experiments have been carried out on an organism that shares no common ancestry with any other terrestrial life-form. The experiments, reported by Lenski and colleagues on page 661 of this issue, were neither in vivo nor in vitro; they used digital organisms created in a computer — 'in silico'. The results, claim the authors, support the view that complex interactions between multiple mutations are a general feature of genetic systems. In living organisms these interactions are difficult to measure, but they could be related to such thorny evolutionary issues as the origin and maintenance of sex. Can these findings from a digital world be extrapolated to the real world?
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