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."

Comments

so dna mutation over generation is not enough for

[unity100]

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.

Re:Organized trolling campaign on Slashdot

[larry bagina]

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.