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.
Identification of a two-tier functional redundancy to combat proteostasis imbalance induced due to tRNA expansion and oxidative stress in multicellular animals.
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.
Two new unicellular organisms reveal that coordinated contractions of groups of cells using actomyosin predated animal multicellularity during evolution.
Cancer is a consequence of the release of basal cellular functions inherited from our unicellular ancestors from the control of regulatory networks that evolved during the emergence of multicellularity.
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.
