Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii, a close cousin of animals. In red, the membranes and in blue the nuclei with their DNA. The image was obtained ...

Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, Georgia Tech researchers watched as their model organism, “snowflake yeast,” began to adapt as multicellular individuals. [email protected] ...

Paleontologists have found fossilized multicellular marine algae, or seaweed, dating back more than 555 million years, ranking among the oldest examples of multicellular life on Earth. Honing in on ...

Cells can evolve specialized functions under a much broader range of conditions than previously thought, according to a study. Cells can evolve specialised functions under a much broader range of ...

Top row: co-first authors Ang Gao (left) and Krishna Shrinivas (right). Bottom row: co-senior authors Arup Chakraborty (left) and Phillip Sharp (right). A computational model developed by scientists ...

Scientists have discovered the fossil of what may be the earliest multicellular animal ever found. Dating back a billion years, the microscopic fossil contains two distinct cell types, potentially ...

The origin of animal multicellularity is one of the major evolutionary transitions in the history of life. The identification and phylogenetic classification of the closest unicellular relatives of ...

In multicellular organisms, there is a potential risk that cheating mutants gain access to the germline. Development from a single-celled zygote resets relatedness among cells to its maximum value ...

Humanity can’t even figure out how to cryogenically freeze a single person for a short period of time. (Though NASA and Dippin’ Dots are both on the case.) But evolution has nailed keeping things ...

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a ...

One-celled organisms began influencing life once their descendants achieved multicellularity. Researchers once thought that this multicellularity transition was rather explosive, but it turns out that ...

Until one or two billion years ago, life on Earth was limited to a soup of single-celled creatures. Then one fateful day, a lonely cell surrendered solitude for communal living. It developed a chance ...