Coordination between individuals is a fundamental challenge in collectives, and this is just as true for a country's government as it is for simple multicellular organisms. How does a group of many ...

The world would look very different without multicellular organisms—take away the plants, animals, fungi, and seaweed, and Earth starts to look like a wetter, greener version of Mars. But precisely ...

How did life make the leap from single cells to coordinated, multicellular organisms? And how do genetically identical cells ...

Researchers have discovered the first in-situ evidence of chlorophyll remnants in a billion-year-old multicellular algal microfossil preserved in shales from the Congo Basin. This discovery has made ...

All the living things that we can see evolved from those that we can’t. Every human, bird, tree, and flower can trace its ancestry across a few billion years back to microscopic, single-celled ...

Cells can compensate a disruptive change in one ion channel by compensatory changes in other channels. We have simulated the adaptation of a multicellular aggregate of non-excitable cells to the ...

Marine bacteria normally seen as single cells join together as a “microscopic snow globe” to consume bulky floating carbohydrates. Close your eyes and imagine bacteria. Perhaps you’re picturing our ...

A team of scientists, led by the University of Sheffield in the UK and Boston College in the U.S., has found a microfossil in the Scottish Highlands which contains two distinct cell types and could be ...

In the multicellular soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, some cells start producing lots of antibiotics after mutations delete big chunks of their genomes. Now a computer model has helped to ...

Improved in vitro models are needed for regenerative therapy and drug screening. Here, we report on functionally aligned nanoparticle-trapped nanopattern arrays for spatially controlled, precise ...

Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, researchers watched as their model organism, 'snowflake yeast,' began to adapt as multicellular individuals. In new research, the team shows how ...