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 ...

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 ...

Multicellular organisms (animals, plants, humans) all have the ability to methylate the cytosine base in their DNA. This process, a type of epigenetic modification, plays an important role in ...

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a ...

Throughout the history of life on Earth, multicellular life evolved from single cells numerous times, but explaining how this happened is one of the major evolutionary puzzles of our time. However, ...

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 ...

At some point, organisms changed and grew from a single cell into one made up of many cells. But how that happened is not well understood. New work by graduate candidate Jonathan Featherston of the ...

The diversity of unicellular eukaryotes covered in the study, with their nucleus (blue) and microtubule cytoskeleton (magenta) stained. These organisms are so distantly related to each other as they ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) — a class of small RNAs with a role in the regulation of gene expression — had until now been found only in multicellular organisms. Now, Wang, Qi and colleagues provide the first ...

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 ...

Unicellular organisms show surprising complexity In a paper appearing in Nature Genetics, researchers discover that in more "primitive" unicellular organisms, both the adenine and the cytosine bases ...