Top row: co-first authors Ang Gao (left) and Krishna Shrinivas (right). Bottom row: co-senior authors Arup Chakraborty (left) and Phillip Sharp (right). A computational model developed by scientists ...

Complex life has arisen through a series of ‘major transitions’ in which collectives of formerly autonomous individuals evolve into a single, integrated organism. A key step in this process is the ...

All the living things that we can see evolved from those that we can’t. Every human, bird, tree, and flower can trace its ancestry across a few billion years back to microscopic, single-celled ...

One of the biggest evolutionary hurdles for life on Earth was the jump from single-celled to multi-cellular organisms…or at least, that’s what we thought. Scientists set out to replicate this ...

In a recent study, researchers gained new insight into the lives of bacteria that survive by grouping together as if they were a multicellular organism. The organisms in the study are the only ...

A team of scientists, led by the University of Sheffield in the UK and Boston College in the U.S., has found a microfossil in the Scottish Highlands which contains two distinct cell types and could be ...

At some point, organisms changed and grew from a single cell into one made up of many cells. But how that happened is not well understood. New work by graduate candidate Jonathan Featherston of the ...

Scientists have discovered the fossil of what may be the earliest multicellular animal ever found. Dating back a billion years, the microscopic fossil contains two distinct cell types, potentially ...

All multicellular creatures are descended from single-celled organisms. The leap from unicellularity to multicellularity is possible only if the originally independent cells collaborate. So-called ...

Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a ...

Today, more than half of the human population lives in hive-like warrens called cities. Does this mean we are on the tipping point of becoming colony animals the way bees and ants did? It’s not ...

Funding: W.C.R. acknowledges support from the NIH (grant no. 5R35GM138030) and NSF (CAREER Grant no. 1845363), A.J.B. acknowledges support from the Human Frontiers Science Program grant (RGY0080/2020) ...