Allele-specific expression, natural antisense transcripts, and developmental gene expression, but not RNA editing or developmental hourglass, act in concert to shape the transcriptome during the fruiting body formation of complex multicellular fungi.
José Muñoz-Dorado, Aurelio Moraleda-Muñoz ... Juana Pérez
Investigation of global gene expression profiles during formation of the Myxococcus xanthus specialized biofilm reveals a genetic regulatory network that coordinates cell motility, differentiation, and secondary metabolite production.
The development of colonies of cells in choanoflagellates, water-dwelling organisms that feed on bacteria, is triggered by the presence of very low concentrations of a lipid molecule produced by certain types of bacteria.
Genome editing in the choanoflagellate Salpingoeca rosetta opens newfound possibilities to functionally probe choanoflagellate genes that may illuminate the origin of their closest relatives, the animals.
Jennifer T Pentz, Kathryn MacGillivray ... William C Ratcliff
Clonal development, but not aggregation, promotes the transition of Darwinian individuality from cells to groups, emphasizing the fundamental role of initial multicellular life cycles in the evolution of multicellularity.
Irreversible differentiation into somatic cells is evolutionarily optimal if changing cell phenotype is costly, a few somatic cells already improve the organism's performance, and the organism is large enough.
The distributions of cellular neighborhood volumes in two very different multicellular species - snowflake yeast and Volvox carteri - are found to obey a common functional form arising from maximum entropy consideration, despite great differences in their cell division processes.
Alex de Mendoza, Hiroshi Suga ... Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo
Functional genomics reveal complex genome regulation during the coenocytic development of the ichthyosporean Creolimax fragrantissima, a protist closely related to animals.
