ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2015
Emergence of multicellularity in a model of cell growth, death and aggregation under size-dependent selection.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cell division timing shapes the morphology and size of nascent multicellular organisms.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The limits of information in precise regulation of early multicellular life cycles.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Adaptive evolutionary trajectories in complexity: Transitions between unicellularity and facultative differentiated multicellularity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Is Cancer Metabolism an Atavism?Cancers · 2024Review
- A dynamic network model predicts the phenotypes of multicellular clusters from cellular properties.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Group-selection via aggregative propagule-formation enables cooperative multicellularity in an individual based, spatial model.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Multicellular growth as a dynamic network of cells.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Evolution of selfish multicellularity: collective organisation of individual spatio-temporal regulatory strategies.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Unicellular-multicellular evolutionary branching driven by resource limitations.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Cryptic surface-associated multicellularity emerges through cell adhesion and its regulation.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- The Consequences of Budding versus Binary Fission on Adaptation and Aging in Primitive Multicellularity.Genes · 2021Article
- Exploring the evolution of multicellularity inEcology and evolution · 2018Article
- On the origin of biological construction, with a focus on multicellularity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Network-based approaches to quantify multicellular development.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2017Review
- Transition from one- to two-dimensional development facilitates maintenance of multicellularity.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- The major synthetic evolutionary transitions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Apoptosis in snowflake yeast: novel trait, or side effect of toxic waste?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2016Article
- Emergence of proto-organisms from bistable stochastic differentiation and adhesion.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How multicellular life forms evolved from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations have shown that selection for faster sedimenting cells leads to the appearance of stable aggregates of cells that are able to split into smaller clusters. It was suggested that the observed evolutionary patterns could be the result of evolved programmes affecting cell death. Here, we show, using a simple model of cell-cell interactions and evolving adhesion rates, that the observed patterns in cluster size and localized mortality can be easily interpreted in terms of waste accumulation and toxicity-driven apoptosis. This simple mechanism would have played a key role in the early evolution of multicellular life forms based on both aggregative and clonal development. The potential extensions of this work and its implications for natural and synthetic multicellularity are discussed.
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