ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Experimental evolution of multicellularity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 223 papers.
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Who cites it
223 citing papers in PubMed.
- Experimental snowball earth viscosity drives the evolution of motile multicellularity.iScience · 2026Article
- Review
- Sedimentation accelerates mixed-substrate conversion during sequential batch cultivation of a co-culture of sugar-specialist yeast strains.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Effects of RIM15 deletion on yeast adaptation to synthetic spruce hydrolysate.Microbial cell factories · 2026Article
- Constraints on the G1/S transition pathway may favor selection of multicellularity as a passenger phenotype.eLife · 2026Article
- The Maximum Growth Temperature for Eukaryotes Is Thermodynamically Driven but Ecologically Contingent.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Cell division timing shapes the morphology and size of nascent multicellular organisms.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Genetic and environmental determinants of multicellular-like phenotypes in fission yeast.Genetics · 2026Article
- Direct benefits are not necessary for the evolution of multicellularity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Two kinds of evolutionary individuals: the concept of common interest as an evolutionary foundation of dualism on biological individuality.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2026Article
- Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Hydra at the Crossroads of Evolution: Insights into Cell-type Diversification, Regeneration, and Epigenetic Regulation.Results and problems in cell differentiation · 2026Review
- Article
- Using Experimental Evolution to Correct Mother-Daughter Separation Defects in Brewing Yeast.microPublication biology · 2026Article
- Stochastic phenotypic switching arises in response to directional selection in experimentally evolved multicellular yeast.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Evolutionary cell biology comes of age.Journal of cell science · 2025Article
- Article
- Top-Down Coercive Mechanisms and the Major Transitions in Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
163 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Multicellularity was one of the most significant innovations in the history of life, but its initial evolution remains poorly understood. Using experimental evolution, we show that key steps in this transition could have occurred quickly. We subjected the unicellular yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to an environment in which we expected multicellularity to be adaptive. We observed the rapid evolution of clustering genotypes that display a novel multicellular life history characterized by reproduction via multicellular propagules, a juvenile phase, and determinate growth. The multicellular clusters are uniclonal, minimizing within-cluster genetic conflicts of interest. Simple among-cell division of labor rapidly evolved. Early multicellular strains were composed of physiologically similar cells, but these subsequently evolved higher rates of programmed cell death (apoptosis), an adaptation that increases propagule production. These results show that key aspects of multicellular complexity, a subject of central importance to biology, can readily evolve from unicellular eukaryotes.
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