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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."
GreatBunzinni has been posting anonymous accusations listing a whole bunch of Slashdot accounts as being part of a marketing campaign for Microsoft, without any evidence. GreatBunzinni has accidentally outed himself as this anonymous poster. Half the accounts he attacks don't even post pro-Microsoft rhetoric. The one thing they appear to have in common is that they have been critical of Google in the past. GreatBunzinni has been using multiple accounts to post these "shill" accusations, such as Galestar, NicknameOne, and flurp.
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. Metamoderation is supposed to address this by filtering out the bad moderators, but clearly it's not working.
This "shill" crap that has been flying around lately has to stop. It's restricting a variety of viewpoints from participating on the site and creating an echo chamber.
This is likely just re-emergence of previously evolved and currently dormant behavior.
No really, whatever comment you were thinking of posting, don't. It's shit.
Now go outside.
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?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
single-cell life + intelligent designer = multi-cell life.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
Then surely it should be possible for Chinese people to evolve a conscience. Or a culture.
Now we just have to wait another 1 or 2 billion years and those test tubes will have people inside them
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.
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!
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.
Will our new clumpy yeasty overlords still make beer for us?
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.
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.
took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals
This is not possible. All the school book selection panels agree, evolution is not possible. That is why they all schools teach Intelligent Design (creationism) instead.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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?