Do these cells already have the blueprints for multicellular organization, latent until selection exerts pressure for its manifestation? Is it much easier to reproduce the phenomenona since it's already happened before? Do cells ever go back to the single life?
The authors indicate the blueprints were already present but the multicellular expression stopped being optional in their evolved population:
The ability of wild-type C. reinhardtii to form palmelloids suggests that the founding population in our experiment already possessed a toolkit for producing multicellular structures. However, while the palmelloid condition is expressed facultatively in wild-type C. reinhardtii, the strains that evolved in our experiment are obligately multicellular.
Maybe I'm not familiar with how this term is used in biology but given the above it seems the "de novo" claim in the paper title is a little sensationalist.
I agree, but IANAB. From Wikipedia, this specie is of the genus
Chlamydomonas of the family Chlamydomonadaceae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlamydomonadales that include a lot of multicelular species. So, they have many multicelular relatives, we should ask a biologist if they have a multicelular ancestor.
That makes it way less interesting. The first time multicellular life happened it took billions of years and simple single cell organisms had to figure it out from scratch.
...or, it's not that different from dividing completely into two, and they just didn't do it for a long time because there weren't enough predation-based species to make it worth doing?
Comments
Do these cells already have the blueprints for multicellular organization, latent until selection exerts pressure for its manifestation? Is it much easier to reproduce the phenomenona since it's already happened before? Do cells ever go back to the single life?
The authors indicate the blueprints were already present but the multicellular expression stopped being optional in their evolved population:
The ability of wild-type C. reinhardtii to form palmelloids suggests that the founding population in our experiment already possessed a toolkit for producing multicellular structures. However, while the palmelloid condition is expressed facultatively in wild-type C. reinhardtii, the strains that evolved in our experiment are obligately multicellular.
Maybe I'm not familiar with how this term is used in biology but given the above it seems the "de novo" claim in the paper title is a little sensationalist.
I agree, but IANAB. From Wikipedia, this specie is of the genus Chlamydomonas of the family Chlamydomonadaceae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlamydomonadales that include a lot of multicelular species. So, they have many multicelular relatives, we should ask a biologist if they have a multicelular ancestor.
That makes it way less interesting. The first time multicellular life happened it took billions of years and simple single cell organisms had to figure it out from scratch.
...or, it's not that different from dividing completely into two, and they just didn't do it for a long time because there weren't enough predation-based species to make it worth doing?
All of these questions are answered in the article.
But the answers are all less interesting than the headline, making me not want to take the time for the article.