Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single cells and forming multicellular structures. This ability to alternate ...

Volvocine algae provide an excellent model for understanding the gradual evolution from unicellularity to complex multicellularity. Spanning a range of organization from simple unicellular forms to ...

That's why the scientists think their Stentor model precedes other models of early multicellularity (which is believed to have evolved at least 25 times in different lineages). "This is earlier, much ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single cells and forming multicellular structures. This ability to alternate ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...

Learn how one-celled organisms, or single-celled organisms, helped build complex life.

In a stunning breakthrough, scientists have successfully engineered a living mouse using a gene that predates animal life by ...

Evolved macroscopic "snowflake" yeast from the MuLTEE experiment. The large size of the nuclei (yellow) and cells (cyan) are results of whole-genome duplication and aneuploidy. Sometimes, the most ...

When a cell divides, the genome has to be duplicated, then the two copies separate, with one going to each daughter cell. But there have been whole genome duplication events in organisms in which both ...

The evolutionary origin of sperm can be traced back to a single-celled ancestor of all living animals. Almost all animals reproduce by having a single-celled stage of their life cycle, involving two ...