How did life make the leap from single cells to coordinated, multicellular organisms? And how do genetically identical cells ...

A new evolutionary analysis suggests that modern blood and immune cells may preserve a 700-million-year legacy inherited from ...

Blood cells carry a deep evolutionary history. A new analysis suggests their earliest ancestors were macrophage-like cells inherited from single-celled life.

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the ...

New studies by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology show that competition between different evolutionary developmental stages of multicellular life cycles can be important for the ...

A team of scientists, led by the University of Sheffield in the UK and Boston College in the U.S., has found a microfossil in the Scottish Highlands which contains two distinct cell types and could be ...

Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, researchers watched as their model organism, 'snowflake yeast,' began to adapt as multicellular individuals. In new research, the team shows how ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

Marine bacteria normally seen as single cells join together as a “microscopic snow globe” to consume bulky floating carbohydrates. Close your eyes and imagine bacteria. Perhaps you’re picturing our ...

Although bacteria may form colonies and biofilms, they do not constitute multicellular lifeforms like, well, us. Bacteria lack the ability to coordinate the basics of multicellularity, which include ...

In the multicellular soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, some cells start producing lots of antibiotics after mutations delete big chunks of their genomes. Now a computer model has helped to ...