[LINK] "What Yeast Reveals About the Origins of Multicellular Life"

[rfmcdonald]

Wired's Emily Singer describes how scientists have recreated a critical stage in the evolution of life.

Until one or two billion years ago, life on Earth was limited to a soup of single-celled creatures. Then one fateful day, a lonely cell surrendered solitude for communal living. It developed a chance mutation that made its progeny stick together, eventually giving rise to the first multicellular life.

With that simple innovation, a world of possibilities burst open. These new organisms were too big to be eaten, and their mammoth size allowed them to pull in more food from the environment. Most important, individual cells within the bunch could begin to specialize, taking on new functions, such as hunting, eating and defense. The transition to multicellularity was so successful that it happened over and over again in Earth’s evolutionary history—at least 25 times, and very likely more.

Multicellularity has clear advantages—just look at the menagerie of form and function among animals, plants and fungi. But scientists have long been puzzled as to how this transformation took place. A true multicellular organism acts as a unit, meaning that each cell must surrender its will to survive as an individual and act to ensure the survival of the larger group. “The problem with all the major evolutionary transitions is how Darwinian entities relinquish their individual fitness and become part of a higher-level unit,” said Richard Michod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Scientists are gaining insight into the process by re-creating the evolution of multicellularity in the lab. Using an approach known as experimental evolution, they prod single-celled microbes, such as yeast, algae or bacteria, to develop a multicell form.

“It’s easy to think of [these major transitions] as a giant leap in evolution, and in some sense that’s true,” said Ben Kerr, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the researchers studying major transitions in evolution. But each transition actually involved a series of small advances—the organisms had to evolve effective ways to stick together, to cooperate, to divide and to develop specialized jobs within the greater whole. “We’re trying to do the opposite of a giant leap. We’re trying to break one giant leap for evolution into an understandable series of small steps.”

William Ratcliff, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his collaborators have discovered a surprisingly simple route to multicellularity: a single mutation in yeast that adheres the mother cell to its daughter to create a snowflake-like shape. These snowflakes grow and divide in a way that provides a clever solution to one of the major pitfalls of multicellularity: the cheater problem, in which lazy cells take advantage of cooperative ones. And while the work hasn’t produced a true multicellular organism, the snowflake yeast has shown just how easy it can be for life to take the first step toward a major biological transformation.