When Artificial Life approaches are used with school pupils, it is generally to help them learn about the dynamics of living systems and/or their evolution. Here, we propose to use it to teach the scientific and experimental method, rather than biology. We experimented this alternative pedagogical usage during the 5 days internship of a young schoolboy – Quentin – with astonishing results. Indeed, not only Quentin easily grasped the principles of science and experiments but meanwhile he also collected very interesting results that shed a new light on the evolution of genome size and, more precisely, on genome streamlining. This article summarizes this success story and analyzes its results on both educational and scientific perspectives.

Stable bacterial cross-feeding interactions, where one strain feeds on the waste of the other, are important to understand, as they can be a first step towards bacterial speciation. Their emergence is commonly observed in laboratory experiments using Escherichia coli as a model organism. Yet it is not clear how cross-feeding interactions can resist the invasion of a fitter mutant when the environment contains a single resource since there seems to be a single ecological niche. Here, we used digital organisms to tackle this question, allowing for detailed and fast investigations, and providing a way to disentangle generic evolutionary mechanisms from specificities associated with E. coli. Digital organisms with evolvable genomes and metabolic networks compete for resources in conditions mimicking laboratory evolution experiments. In chemostat simulations, although cross-feeding interactions regularly emerged, selective sweeps regularly purged the population of its diversity. By contrast, batch culture allowed for much more stable cross-feeding interactions, because it includes seasons and thus distinct temporal niches, thereby favoring the adaptive diversification of proto-species.