Latest Multicellular organism Stories
BioMed Central A 'cheater' mutation (chtB) in Dictyostelium discoideum, a free living slime mold able to co-operate as social organism when food is scarce, allows the cheater strain to exploit its social partner, finds a new study published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. The mutation ensures that when mixed with 'normal' Dictyostelium more than the fair share of cheaters become spores, dispersing to a new environment, and avoiding dying as stalk cells....
Bacteria have a bad rap as agents of disease, but scientists are increasingly discovering their many benefits, such as maintaining a healthy gut. A new study now suggests that bacteria may also have helped kick off one of the key events in evolution: the leap from one-celled organisms to many-celled organisms, a development that eventually led to all animals, including humans. Published this month in the inaugural edition of the new online journal eLife, the study by University of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New work by Dr. Stuart A. Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, develops a concept that dramatically alters one of the basic assumptions of the theory of evolution. The assumption is that survival is based on a change's functional advantage if it is to persist. Newman, whose life's work has supported the theory of evolution, offers an alternative model where he proposes that the origination of...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Nothing sounds dumber than “Slime Mold.” This might even be one of the more demeaning insult in sophomoric lexicon, as nothing sounds worse. Yet, for all its off-putting properties, (the slime, the mold) this little organism is fascinating to scientists and researchers, studying how it is able to grow, move and expand. The makeup of slime mold is relatively simple: A community of single-celled spores which have combined their...
One of the greatest mysteries of evolutionary biology revolves around the question of how Earth’s original single-celled ancestors — the predecessors of all life on the planet — first made the critical transition to multicellularity. A new study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), however, points out that the switch may not have been as difficult as most scientists have speculated. The traditional paradigm for attempting to understand the...
More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on the Earth’s surface began forming multicellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. Just how that happened is a question that has eluded evolutionary biologists. But scientists in the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences have replicated that key step in the laboratory using natural selection and common brewer’s yeast, which are single-celled organisms. The yeast “evolved” into...
Follow how single-celled organisms began forming multi-cellular clusters More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on Earth's surface began forming multi-cellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. Just how that happened is a question that has eluded evolutionary biologists. Now scientists have replicated that key step in the laboratory using common Brewer's yeast, a single-celled organism. The yeast "evolved" into multi-cellular clusters that work...
Remote lochs along the west coast of Scotland are turning up new evidence about the origins of life on land. A team of scientists from the University of Sheffield, the University of Oxford and Boston College, who are exploring rocks around Loch Torridon, have discovered the remarkably preserved remains of organisms that once lived on the bottom of ancient lake beds as long as a billion (1,000 million) years ago.These fossils illuminate a key moment in the history of evolution when life made...
Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the University of Oxford have uncovered a clue that may help to explain why the earliest evidence of complex multicellular animal life appears around 550 million years ago, when atmospheric oxygen levels on the planet rose sharply from 3% to their modern day level of 21%. The team, led by Professor Chris Schofield, has found that humans share a method of sensing oxygen with the world's simplest...
One of the most pivotal steps in evolution-the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms-may not have required as much retooling as commonly believed, found a globe-spanning collaboration of scientists led by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.A comparison of the genomes of the multicellular algae Volvox carteri and its closest unicellular relative Chlamydomonas reinhardtii revealed that multicellular...
