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 ...

Researchers have discovered that virus-like nanoparticles can promote the multicellular organization and reproduction of host bacteria. These particles, which are evolutionarily related to phages ...

A major event in the evolution of organisms on earth was the development of complex, multicellular life forms made of eukaryotic cells, which are thought to have come from prokaryotic cells. Studies ...

Cells can evolve specialized functions under a much broader range of conditions than previously thought, according to a study. Cells can evolve specialised functions under a much broader range of ...

Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional ...

All the living things that we can see evolved from those that we can’t. Every human, bird, tree, and flower can trace its ancestry across a few billion years back to microscopic, single-celled ...

Scientists have discovered the fossil of what may be the earliest multicellular animal ever found. Dating back a billion years, the microscopic fossil contains two distinct cell types, potentially ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. The Universe was already two-thirds of its present age by the time the ...

In 2016, Craig Venter and his team at Synthetic Genomics announced that they had created a lifeform called JCVI-syn3.0, whose genome consisted of only 473 genes. This stripped-down organism was a ...

The evolution of sexual reproduction in living beings is one of the biggest mysteries in biology. There are two known modes of reproduction: asexual, where the organism creates clones of itself, and ...