Learn how one-celled organisms, or single-celled organisms, helped build complex life.

The evolution of multicellularity represents one of the most consequential transitions in the history of life. This process, in which individual cells coalesce to form integrated and functionally ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single ...

That's why the scientists think their Stentor model precedes other models of early multicellularity (which is believed to have evolved at least 25 times in different lineages). "This is earlier, much ...

A biochemist, building on the pillars of evolutionary theory and drawing on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and genes, argues that the evolution of multicellular life was the result ...

Evolved macroscopic "snowflake" yeast from the MuLTEE experiment. The large size of the nuclei (yellow) and cells (cyan) are results of whole-genome duplication and aneuploidy. Sometimes, the most ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single ...

The evolutionary origin of sperm can be traced back to a single-celled ancestor of all living animals. Almost all animals reproduce by having a single-celled stage of their life cycle, involving two ...

What do you think of when you picture an egg? Almost certainly something oval – most likely a hen’s egg, at least at first. But eggs as a broader category exist in many forms and have been around ...