Assignment problem: To study antibiotic resistance in bacteria, a team of scientist set up an experiment using E. coli where one strain was exposed to increasing levels of antibiotics. See here for the description of the experiment and main results. Based on this experiment answer the following questions:
a) Do you think that if this population of E. coli cells was diploid, it would be in Hardy- Weinberg equilibrium? Explain your answer.
b) What phenomenon explains the fact that E. coli was eventually able to survive the highest level of antibiotics? Explain your answer.
c) It took 11 days for E. coli to colonize the highest antibiotic level. Knowing that this species generation time is on average 20 minutes how many generations did this process take? Based on this experiment, what can you conclude about how fast organisms change due to environmental change? Also, how do you think experiments like this can contribute for guiding medical practices?