A new paper describing the results of a yeast evolution experiment has been published in Evolution. Jordan Gulli exposed nascent multicellular “snowflake yeast” to an environment in which solitary multicellular clusters experienced low survival. In response, snowflake yeast evolved to form cooperative groups composed of thousands of multicellular clusters.
The Common Descent podcast spent a few minutes talking about the new Scientific Reports paper (~18:25-24:30):
Our Director of Communications, Maureen Rouhi, has written a press release to accompany the new Scientific Reports paper, “De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation.”
The time-lapse videos Josh Borin recorded, which show growth of unicellular and multicellular isolates described in the new Scientific Reports paper, are now available on YouTube. Although the videos for this open access paper are available for download from the publisher, several commenters have complained that they are not viewable on all platforms. Hopefully they are now viewable by everyone.
I have set this page up to link to science-related content from my personal blog, Fierce Roller. My reason for doing this is to make it easier to follow my science writing for people who are not interested in, for example, my disputes with creationists, skepticism about Cuban sound guns, and occasional political content.
I have set up a new page, Fierce Roller Blog, to post links to content from freethoughtblogs.com/fierceroller on topics related to my research interests. If I have set this up right, the blog content will not show up on my home page, which will be reserved for announcements related to my lab and research. You will find the blog content under the “Fierce Roller Blog” entry in the main menu.
In the post announcing the new paper in Scientific Reports, I accidentally linked to the DOI of the bioRxiv preprint instead of the peer-reviewed version of the article. The correct DOI is 10.1038/s41598-019-39558-8, and I have corrected this in the post.
A new paper describing the results of a microbial evolution experiment has been published in Scientific Reports. Predation by the filter-feeding predator Paramecium tetraurelia drove the evolution of simple multicellular structures in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii:
From the abstract:
Here we show that de novo origins of simple multicellularity can evolve in response to predation. We subjected outcrossed populations of the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to selection by the filter-feeding predator Paramecium tetraurelia. Two of five experimental populations evolved multicellular structures not observed in unselected control populations within ~750 asexual generations. Considerable variation exists in the evolved multicellular life cycles, with both cell number and propagule size varying among isolates. survival assays show that evolved multicellular traits provide effective protection against predation. These results support the hypothesis that selection imposed by predators may have played a role in some origins of multicellularity.
Herron MD, Borin JM, Boswell JC, Walker J, Knox CA, Boyd M, Rosenzweig F, Ratcliff WC. 2019 De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation. Sci. Rep. 9, 2328. (doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-39558-8)
A new paper using analytical and simulation models to explore the relationships between particle-level heritability and collective-level heritability during major transitions has been published in BMC Biology:
