Slashdot Mirror
Multicellular Life Evolves In Months, In a Lab
ananyo writes "The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth's history, could have occurred with surprising speed, U.S. researchers have shown. In the lab, a single-celled yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labor, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce. Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times, but these transitions are so ancient that they have been hard to study. The researchers wanted to see if they could evolve multicellularity in a single-celled organism, using gravity as the selective pressure. In a tube of liquid, clusters of yeast cells settle at the bottom more quickly than single cells. By culturing only the cells that sank, they selected for those that stick together. After many rounds of selection over 60 days, the yeast had evolved into 'snowflakes' comprising dozens of cells."
This is likely just re-emergence of previously evolved and currently dormant behavior.
Experimental evolution of multicellularity
And PNAS has it listed as open access, which means you should be able to download the full text regardless of your subscriber (or non-subscriber) status. Just click the Full Text link.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Do the mechanisms which originally created life still occur? Or is "The Genesis Event" so rare that it was a one-time occurrence billions of years ago?
Given the yeast they evolved, "Saccharomyces cerevisiae", does this mean we get better, or more intelligent beer?
Red
That beer is the nectar of The Gods.
God still holds the copyright for the original genesis event. It should have entered the public domain, but the copyright just keeps getting extended, and extended for billions of years. God keeps raking in the royalties and has no incentive to create new works, which is why you haven't heard anything from him lately.
Actually, the opposite of what you say is true. That's the whole point of using the word "selection" in the phrase "natural selection". Anything that helps the organism survive and reproduce better in its environment is a selective pressure. So if you postulate that there exists somewhere on the planet where multi-cellularism is a selective force, then this experiment replicates those conditions.
E pluribus unum
Reading the comments on the physorg page made by intelligent design supporters, I have come to a conclusion. Some of us have not evolved far beyond yeast.
So they spent two months making the world's tiniest loafs of bread?
Yeast already has a natural ability to flocculate, differing by strain. All they did is use artificial selection to produce a new strain of yeast with higher flocculation. The article mentions that yeast evolved from a multicellular life form and that the next experiment will use single celled organisms which did not evolve this way. I suspect it will take much longer than 60 days to see any results.
College kids have been doing this for years and years, go walk around any dorm, new species of microscopic life are constantly evolving in the showers.
Monstar L
Holy crap, your post history is almost entirely +5 karma whoring. I've never seen so many pandering, populist +5 comments.
Well, it's not that hard to create a similar environment in the real world, they take too long to get grant money for. Consider, for example, a microbe growing in a hot spring that needs a very high temperature to function properly (like every molecular biologist's friend, Thermus aquaticus.) If that thing floats to the top of the pond, it might get cold and die. Evolutionary pressures such as sink-or-die aren't that implausible.
Think of it this way: a random walk will get to every possible location eventually. If you push it in a certain direction, it'll simply get there sooner. But if it doesn't get there when you do, then there's no chance it'll ever get there on its own. Unless they tampered with the genes of the yeast in question, these results are completely legitimate.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Once again, great successes hailed while ignoring the elephant in the room: the researchers cheated by selecting out certain ones (those that sank to the bottom.) in TRUE life-by-incremental-changes, every event is random, including which cells are selected out of the tube to prosper.
False.
The purpose of this "selection" was simply to simulate a larger environment. If this occurred in a big place relative to the size of the yeast, let's call this imaginary place the ocean, it is highly likely the yeast wouldn't be contained to a test tube. It would disperse on its own. Selecting certain ones and continuing to examine them is the same as zooming in and following the large ones in the ocean you'd like to examine. The centrifuge is not meant for culling, selective breeding or to "intelligently design evolution in yeast".
N.B. I have no idea about the atmospheric requirements for this experiment as I skipped that part of the original article. For all I know the bigger place could have been a rock, a lake, a cloud or an iceberg. The argument is based upon the false implication that yeast only exists in constrained environments.
Not to diminish the importance of multi-cellularity (and of this discovery) but wasn't the development of Eukaryotes (cells with Nuclei and other differentiated organelles) the big step needed for complex life? I mean with chloroplasts you get plants and mitochondria (or mitoklorines for you Star Wars fans) you get animals.
With multi-cellularity and prokaryotes you get strombolites (algal mats).
That said, it shows that evolution can happen quite quickly and can overcome some serious obstacles in a short amount of time in a very limited scope (a laboratory workbench). When multiplied by geologic ages and oceans of room is it any wonder that life has evolved in so many fascinating ways?
I had no idea who GreatBunzinni was until your crapflood.
I see no evidence in your posts of GreatBunzinni using multiple accounts to shill. I see a possible AC post. I see someone questioning bonch.
You on the other hand are a spammy bastard who is haunting Slashdot and amassing a GNAA-worthy number of FPs. One has to wonder whether you are paid for your attentiveness.
I recognise some of the names on GreatBunzinni's list and thought they sounded a little 'shill'. Now this. It adds weight to my suspicions.
If you are one of the aggrieved, respond to posts where they out you. Logged in. Maybe the GreatBunzini has included some names they shouldn't have. Until then, _your_ crusade has just confirmed the GreatBunzini's accusations, as far as I am concerned. Well done.
With apologies for the offtopicness of this post.
I suspect it's not "evolution" at all, but subtly bad science (i.e. a scientist gunning for more grant money). DNA can express in many ways given varying environmental conditions, without the mutations that characterize true evolution -- and artificially forcing genetic drift by selecting for the bottom-clumpers is certainly VERY DIFFERENT from having gravity serve as the "selection pressure."
It's well known DNA can express in many different ways without true evolution. We've come a long way from the theory of Lamarckian evolutionary theory (evolution of acquired characteristics). One is example: exons, which can express differently across generations based on environmental conditions-- without actual change to the DNA.
I'm thinking this great discovery will get pounded upon by other biologists pretty quickly -- and put in its proper place as an interesting science experiment that really does not advance the field much if at all. INTERESTING evolution would be a group of mutations that lead to a multicellular outcome. That's NOT what these guys 1) demonstrated happened (multicellular DNA base-pair-causing mutations) or 2) proved was the actual genetic cause at the molecular-biology level.
in TRUE life-by-incremental-changes, every event is random, including which cells are selected out of the tube to prosper
Crawl back under your rock. In a few hundred million years, your descendants may develop something resembling rudimentary intelligence.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What we humans don't know is impressive.
you.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html
and you need bacteria not only to evolve in dna, but also develop into a multicellular organism. in your lifetime.
please.
Read radical news here
So you believe that a bunch of people who share the same opinions about Google means that they're part of a "rapid response team" hired by Microsoft? Really?
Do you read the posts you're replying to?
I have a theory. It's not pro-microsoft shills or rogue google Kenya/India employees or whatever troll conspiracy shit you think it is.
It's actually Kevin Rose.
The digg guy.
They fucked the pooch on their last redesign. So now they're trying to turn slashdot into a cesspool to bring back eyeballs. They also used their elite hacking skills to update the slash codebase with all the gay facebook/twitter/google+ buttons.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Except he didn't plan the form, look or workings of the organism, which means he didn't actually design.
Dilbert RSS feed
This is quite informative. The simplistic experiment in the TFA seems to be just that: simplistic. IOW - bad science.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
It is cheap source of very good quality proteins, vitamins and minerals I put 2 spoonfulls in my orange juice in the morning. If you do eat it make sure it is the deactivated (dead) kind from the supermarket or health shop or it will start to grow in you.
No nerve was struck. I just found it shocking that someone would actually believe a random list of names and a URL, and then continue to justify that belief, complete with nutty implications that I'm getting paid to post (uh, does that mean you are too?). I suggest going back to karma whoring for more +5s.
If there was an 'intelligent designer' then why are the sewer outflows in the middle of the play ground.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
It's snowing, Piss off...
No nerve was struck.
Of course there wasn't.
I suggest going back to karma whoring for more +5s.
You used that insult against AngryDeuce. Your material is getting stale. Or is the script that shallow?
Now we just have to wait another 1 or 2 billion years and those test tubes will have people inside them
He designed it to the same extent that some people design software. But that probably says more about the coders than him...
Doctor, heal thyself?
If there was an 'intelligent designer' then why are the sewer outflows in the middle of the play ground.
Because for some people sewer outflows ARE a playground, especially when the playground is under the effects of a red tide.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The reason is the same as why skyscrapers have their water and drain conduits located together. They're related, and it simplifies construction.
Having a specialized playground, and a dedicated sewer outflow would only waste energy, proteins and time. Be glad they're not all combined in one super mouth-tongue-ear-butt-navel, because that could've been more biologically efficient. But, we lucked out.
Because if there's no grass on the field you should play in the mud.
I think if anyone left Digg to come to Slashdot, the next stage would be suicide, not going back to Digg.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
It's still a pretty bad decision for *most* people.
And also: could this designer please fix my lung-design so the exhaust is on the bottom where it used to be when we were in the prototype phase (codename "monkey")?
My eyes could use an upgrade as well. And while I applaud the decision to incorporate a spare kidney, I would have preferred a heart and liver that is split in two smaller, separate entities as well. We could have one lung with a heart and a liver on each side, drastically reducing the chance of total failure. And also: why no distributed brain nodes? I mean, decentralized processing works for some other species (lobsters) so why not us? And going on that note: there are species that don't get cancer - I'd really like that design feature incorporated in Homo Sapiens 2.0.
Seriously, how intelligent IS this designer if I can improve the designs in 5 minutes of thinking?
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
sweet, a completely different experiment using completely different organisms. You showed him! (Although it is a much better example of "evolution").
"Some cells dying so that others can grow or reproduce" isn't division of labor, it's some individual yeasts in the colony not getting the nutrients the need, and dying as a result. Just because they're clumpy doesn't make them a single creature...
I brew (and judge) beer... different strains of brewers yeast already have widely varying behaviors with regards to how they settle out. Yeast with "low flocculation" tend to remain in suspension for weeks, consuming more of the sugars (drier, more alcoholic beer); yeast with "high flocculation" tend to clump together and settle after a few days, leaving more residual sugar (sweeter/heavier beer). This is widely known already in the brewing community. These strains have evolved over the years to suit the preferences and procedures of individual breweries. So all these guys have really done is to repeat in a controlled environment the same selective breeding that brewers have been doing (whether they understood it or not) for centuries.
Take a look here; if you click through to each individual strain of yeast, you'll see that there's a spec for flocculation (tendency to clump) and attenuation (tendency to consume sugars); there's a pretty good (though not perfect) inverse correlation between the two.
The only thing really novel here is the claim that these yeast clumps somehow represent a first step towards multi-cellular life. Interesting, but -- while I'm not dismissing it out-of-hand -- I'm definitely taking it with a pinch of salt.
Yeast is boring.
When can we see human trials?
The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth's history, could have occurred with surprising speed, U.S. researchers have shown.
The origin of multicellular life comes from unicellular life, which would be one of the most important developments in Earth's history. When they can create that in the lab, then let's talk.
That's not the problem. The problem is that moderators gave him +5 Informative and are now modding down the accused, even for legitimate posts.
Even the legitimate posts? We'll have to be more careful and not mod the legitimate posts down. Sorry, sometimes it's hard to tell.
From the article, they had to intervene and select the yeast cells that were cooperating with what they were trying to do. Unless they are proposing outside intervention by a deity or alien race, it seems that the process they used isn't representative of what would have occurred in nature.
So human beings picking the winners is evolution but God picking them is crazy talk?
...that Earth was only 6000 years old!
On the upside, you are so busy posting about the moderation system that you aren't posting your usual anti-google drivel. I call that a win.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
From life. I'm not surprised.
Life evolves. Dead things don't. And dead things don't evolve into life.
Wake me up if that changes.
It might be snowing piss off, but the neighborhood's dogs will piss on soon enough. Go outside. And don't eat the yellow snow.
Will our new clumpy yeasty overlords still make beer for us?
And also: why no distributed brain nodes? I mean, decentralized processing works for some other species (lobsters) so why not us?
FYI, you have that. It's called reflexes. And you're completely and totally unaware of them, which "Just Works" and also isn't that great of a design for a highly intelligent organism to incorporate too much of, which is why you don't.
I'm fairly sure nobody is accusing anyone of being a shill for the yeast industry, so it's kinda pointless to post this under a story about forced evolution in yeast cells.
The elephant in the room is that they selected from a sample that possibly contained multiple genetic variations already. They just bred the ones that already exhibited the trait they were looking for. Why does that mean mutation or evolution.
That's one thing, but now I want to see an amino acid evolve into a cell !
This looks like a complete abdication of the dictionary definition of biological evolution, which requires genetic changes as a result of random mutations. According to the paper, Radcliff "observed the rapid evolution of clustering genotypes" -- existing genotypes, not new ones. No discussion of a mutating agent, just direct environmental manipulation. That's not evolution. In anyone's book.
This elephant doesn't exist. Yeast researchers routinely streak out the cells on plate media. This process dilutes the cells until you can be sure of getting a few individual cells per square inch. Each single cell then grow up to form a visible colony, which is then used experimentally. In that one colony there is genetic diversity, but it did not exist from before the single cell was isolated.
Yes, I actually am a biologist, a year away from completing my PhD on the subject.
You want as simplistic an experiment as possible. The simpler the experiment, the easier it is to rule out variables other than what you're testing for. IOW - good science.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I dont know how many times he needs to tell you that he's not just believeing some random list.
I'm assuming it's something that you'll just never understand.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Is more of an expert than the experts in every article ever posted to Slashdot.
Once again.
We all know what is possibe with DNA/RNA. Show how it evolved from nothing in the laboratory.
The evolution to DNA is what is more interesting. What was before?
You're right, but only to a point. What I meant by "simlistic" was really idealized: they ignored too many known facts so the experiment is simple but pointless: it cannot provide any decent conclusions.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
learning something that anyone who bakes bread or brews beer already knows?