ArticleNature ecology & evolution2019
Emergence of diverse life cycles and life histories at the origin of multicellularity.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 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
- Article
- Lives in a gram of soil: linking life cycle biology to soil ecology.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- The Origin of Life and Cellular Systems: A Continuum from Prebiotic Chemistry to Biodiversity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast.Science advances · 2025Article
- Steady-State and Dynamical Behavior of a PDE Model of Multilevel Selection with Pairwise Group-Level Competition.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of nascent multicellular lineages.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- 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
- Cell size and selection for stress-induced cell fusion in unicellular eukaryotes.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Open problems in synthetic multicellularity.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- The evolution of multicellularity and cell differentiation symposium: bridging evolutionary cell biology and computational modelling using emerging model systems.Biology open · 2024Review
- Genomic sequencing reveals convergent adaptation during experimental evolution in two budding yeast species.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Metabolically-driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- 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
- Microalgae-material hybrid for enhanced photosynthetic energy conversion: a promising path towards carbon neutrality.National science review · 2023Review
- Evolution of selfish multicellularity: collective organisation of individual spatio-temporal regulatory strategies.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of multicellularity has given rise to a remarkable diversity of multicellular life cycles and life histories. Whereas some multicellular organisms are long-lived, grow through cell division, and repeatedly release single-celled propagules (for example, animals), others are short-lived, form by aggregation, and propagate only once, by generating large numbers of solitary cells (for example, cellular slime moulds). There are no systematic studies that explore how diverse multicellular life cycles can come about. Here, we focus on the origin of multicellularity and develop a mechanistic model to examine the primitive life cycles that emerge from a unicellular ancestor when an ancestral gene is co-opted for cell adhesion. Diverse life cycles readily emerge, depending on ecological conditions, group-forming mechanism, and ancestral constraints. Among these life cycles, we recapitulate both extremes of long-lived groups that propagate continuously and short-lived groups that propagate only once, with the latter type of life cycle being particularly favoured when groups can form by aggregation. Our results show how diverse life cycles and life histories can easily emerge at the origin of multicellularity, shaped by ancestral constraints and ecological conditions. Beyond multicellularity, this finding has similar implications for other major transitions, such as the evolution of sociality.
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