Re:De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation
by gus_massa on Monday February 25, 2019 @07:46PM
(#19251051)
I agree, but IANAB. From Wikipedia, this specie is of the genus
Chlamydomonas of the family Chlamydomonadaceae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlamydomonadales that include a lot of multicelular species. So, they have many multicelular relatives, we should ask a biologist if they have a multicelular ancestor.
Re:De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation
by mrfusion on Monday February 25, 2019 @07:46PM
(#19251056)
That makes it way less interesting. The first time multicellular life happened it took billions of years and simple single cell organisms had to figure it out from scratch.
Re:De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation
by rossdavidh on Monday February 25, 2019 @11:07PM
(#19251897)
...or, it's not that different from dividing completely into two, and they just didn't do it for a long time because there weren't enough predation-based species to make it worth doing?
The ability of wild-type C. reinhardtii to form palmelloids suggests that the founding population in our experiment already possessed a toolkit for producing multicellular structures. However, while the palmelloid condition is expressed facultatively in wild-type C. reinhardtii, the strains that evolved in our experiment are obligately multicellular.
Maybe I'm not familiar with how this term is used in biology but given the above it seems the "de novo" claim in the paper title is a little sensationalist.