The ability to share resources for the benefit of all members of a group may have driven ancient organisms to evolve from a unicellular to a multicellular state.
Selection for undifferentiated multicellularity emerges in an evolutionary cell-based model because a collective of cells performs chemotaxis better than single cells in a noisy environment.
The transition to the aggregative stage of Capsaspora owczarzaki, a close unicellular relative to Metazoa, is associated with significant upregulation of orthologs of genes that are important for multicellularity in metazoans.
Experimentally reconstructing the evolution of the molecular complex that animals use to orient the mitotic spindle establishes a simple genetic and physical mechanism for the emergence of a function essential for multicellularity.
Identification of a two-tier functional redundancy to combat proteostasis imbalance induced due to tRNA expansion and oxidative stress in multicellular animals.
Functional genomics reveal complex genome regulation during the coenocytic development of the ichthyosporean Creolimax fragrantissima, a protist closely related to animals.
Mathematical modeling shows that reproductive specialization is strongly favored in sparse networks of cellular interactions that reflect the morphology of early multicellular organisms, even when benefits of specialization are saturating.
Multicellular and socially aggregating prokaryotes contain previously undescribed, chaperone-based systems predicted to mediate defensive biological conflicts, several components of which are thematically similar antecedents of eukaryotic apoptosis pathways.
