Every multicellular organism, from tiny worms to humans, elephants, and whales, needs a way for their cells to connect with each other to form tissues, organs, and organize their overall body plan.

Life’s leap from single-celled to multicellular organisms marks a pivotal moment in evolutionary history. This transformation laid the foundation for the complex life forms we see today. By studying ...

Life emerged on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago. The “primordial soup theory” proposes that chemicals floating in pools of water, in the presence of sunlight and electrical discharge, spontaneously ...

Some single-celled organisms are known to transition to multicellularity during their lifetimes, usually either by cloning themselves or when many similar cells come together to form a larger ...

The design of synthetic developmental programs for multicellular mammalian systems is a cornerstone of synthetic biology. The programs hinge on the construction of gene regulatory circuits that ...

Researchers have discovered a mechanism steering the evolution of multicellular life. They identified how altered protein folding drives multicellular evolution. Researchers have discovered a ...

In fact, why and how multicellular life evolved has long puzzled biologists. The first known instance of multicellularity was about 2.5 billion years ago, when marine cells (cyanobacteria) hooked up ...

Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii, a close cousin of animals. In red, the membranes and in blue the nuclei with their DNA. The image was obtained ...

Drs. Jeanette Johnson, Elana J. Fertig, and Daniel Bergman review mathematical models and genomic data to simulate cancer cell growth. [University of Maryland School of Medicine] Researchers at ...

Bacterial superorganisms must evolve defenses to fight off infections, and microbiologists found that they use a weapons cache coincidentally similar to that of the human immune system. B cells churn ...