A Journey to the Origins of Multicellular Life: Long-Term Experimental Evolution in the Lab
Published:06 Jul.2023 Source:Georgia Institute of Technology
To investigate how multicellular life evolves from scratch, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology decided to take evolution into their own hands. Led by William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, a team of researchers has initiated the first long-term evolution experiment aimed at evolving new kinds of multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors in the lab.
Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, the researchers watched as their model organism, “snowflake yeast,” began to adapt as multicellular individuals. In research published in Nature, the team shows how snowflake yeast evolved to be physically stronger and more than 20 000 times larger than their ancestor. This type of biophysical evolution is a pre-requisite for the kind of large multicellular life that can be seen with the naked eye. Their study is the first major report on the ongoing Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE), which the team hopes to run for decades.
“Conceptually, what we want to understand is how simple groups of cells evolve into organisms, with specialization, coordinated growth, emergent multicellular behaviors, and life cycles -- the stuff that differentiates a pile of pond scum from an organism that is capable of sustained evolution,” Ratcliff said. “Understanding that process is a major goal of our field.”