Georgia Tech Professor Eric Gaucher between researchers Caelan Radford and Ryan Randall (R). On display are cultures of lab bacteria with mutated proteins fluorescing in various colors.

Proteins inside bacteria fluoresce in colors that reflect their differing genetic make-ups caused by rapid lab-generated mutations. The differences help researchers sort them into evolutionary trees.

Georgia Tech researcher Ryan Randall created an evolutionary tree by rapidly generating mutations of a fluorescing protein and laying out diverging pathways of their strains. Then she ran ancestral sequence reconstruction algorithms back down the tree to benchmark them. The ASRs proved highly accurate.

Associate Professor Eric Gaucher (left) with researchers Ryan Randall (middle) and Caelan Radford (right) in Gaucher's Georgia Tech lab.