That's a pretty interesting article, but note that yeast is already predisposed to form multicellular clumps that exhibit the co-ordination you would expect of a multicellular creature. When you have a species that has already evolved to do this, it's not totally surprising that they can find one variant that could grow from a single cell to repeat the trick!
Ratcliff came up with the concept for the experiment with his colleague Michael Travisano. “We were talking about the coolest work that we could do,” says Ratcliff. “We ruled out the origin of life as too difficult, but thought that evolving multicellularity would be feasible.”
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Date: 2012-01-18 06:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-19 06:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-18 07:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-18 07:09 pm (UTC)That's a pretty interesting article, but note that yeast is already predisposed to form multicellular clumps that exhibit the co-ordination you would expect of a multicellular creature. When you have a species that has already evolved to do this, it's not totally surprising that they can find one variant that could grow from a single cell to repeat the trick!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-19 03:33 am (UTC)Do chloroplasts next!