AIG has an article up on the nylon-digesting bacteria

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Of course, the real problem with the article is the way it keeps referring to evolution as a process simply based on randomness.

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Indeed. Do they think that it is random that this species of flavobacterium is able to outcompete its competition when the primary source of energy is nylon derivatives? AiG always manages to skip right over the natural selection part of evolution and instead focus on the randomness of random mutations. They want to focus on the random chipping of stone and not how the sieve sorts them by size. One is random, granted, but the whole process is not.

Brad,The way I see it, the chances of the mutation that lead to the nylonase enzyme is no different than any other mutation in the genome of the flavobacterium. If Spetner were honest, he would show how every divergence in DNA sequence within the flavobacterium genus/species is equally unlikely. Spetner, in no way, shows how the mutation leading to the nylonase gene is any more improbable than a mutation in a non-coding/neutral region. The Hardy-Weinberg Boys sniff a rat on this one.

Trixie,I dug through the sequence data a little bit myself. Most of the info, including papers by Yomo and Prijambada, can be found on this thread. One of the papers claimed that all of the nylonase genes had a corresponding antisense open reading frame. However, I wasn't able to find one for the nylB' gene. I used the pOAD2 sequence found in NCBI and the ORF Reader from the same site. Good luck.

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I remember reading about other times that nylon-waste 'digesting' proteins (or something) had been evolved through mutations in the lab. Anyone have information on this?

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Yes, the complete citation is:Appl Environ Microbiol. 1995 May;61(5):2020-2. Emergence of nylon oligomer degradation enzymes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO through experimental evolution. Prijambada ID, Negoro S, Yomo T, Urabe I.The complete paper can be found here in PDF format. Interesting article, showing the emergence of two types of nylon digesting enzymes.