Jul 17, 2024 05:16 PM
https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/s...lular-life
INTRO: The arrival of multicellularity around 700 million years ago was one of the most significant steps in the evolution of life. Yet, it’s not clear why and how this happened. Single-celled eukaryotes had happily dominated for a billion years previously. What changed?
A recent study links the evolution of multicellularity to the extreme environmental conditions of the so-called Snowball Earth period that happened around the same time, when glaciers may have stretched from the poles to the equator.
Study researchers looked to evolutionary pressures and the dynamics in the frozen oceans of the time to deduce, via a model, the nature of the first multicellular lifeform. The results suggest that the cold, dark oceans could have produced strange-looking hollow, spherical organisms that grew in size and launched the transition to more complex forms of life.
“We don’t know what these early animal ancestors or other multicellular organisms really look like,” says Chris Kempes, a biologist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and an author on the paper, which is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “But we’re showing a mechanism, a pressure, a push to become multicellular.” (MORE - details)
INTRO: The arrival of multicellularity around 700 million years ago was one of the most significant steps in the evolution of life. Yet, it’s not clear why and how this happened. Single-celled eukaryotes had happily dominated for a billion years previously. What changed?
A recent study links the evolution of multicellularity to the extreme environmental conditions of the so-called Snowball Earth period that happened around the same time, when glaciers may have stretched from the poles to the equator.
Study researchers looked to evolutionary pressures and the dynamics in the frozen oceans of the time to deduce, via a model, the nature of the first multicellular lifeform. The results suggest that the cold, dark oceans could have produced strange-looking hollow, spherical organisms that grew in size and launched the transition to more complex forms of life.
“We don’t know what these early animal ancestors or other multicellular organisms really look like,” says Chris Kempes, a biologist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and an author on the paper, which is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “But we’re showing a mechanism, a pressure, a push to become multicellular.” (MORE - details)