  One way to understand the role history plays on evolutionary trajectories is
by giving ancient life a second opportunity to evolve. Our ability to
empirically perform such an experiment, however, is limited by current
experimental designs. Combining ancestral sequence reconstruction with
synthetic biology allows us to resurrect the past within a modern context and
has expanded our understanding of protein functionality within a historical
context. Experimental evolution, on the other hand, provides us with the
ability to study evolution in action, under controlled conditions in the
laboratory. Here we describe a novel experimental setup that integrates two
disparate fields - ancestral sequence reconstruction and experimental
evolution. This allows us to rewind and replay the evolutionary history of
ancient biomolecules in the laboratory. We anticipate that our combination will
provide a deeper understanding of the underlying roles that contingency and
determinism play in shaping evolutionary processes.
