Billions of years ago, #life crossed a threshold. Single cells started to band together, and a world of formless, unicellular life was on course to evolve into the riot of shapes and functions of multicellular life today, from ants to pear trees to people.

It's a transition as momentous as any in the history of life, and until recently we had no idea how it happened.

But the momentous transition to #multicellular life may not have been so hard after all.

The evidence comes from multiple directions. The evolutionary histories of some groups of organisms record repeated transitions from single-celled to multicellular forms, suggesting the hurdles could not have been so high.

Genetic comparisons between simple multicellular organisms and their single-celled relatives have revealed that much of the molecular equipment needed for cells to band together and coordinate their activities may have been in place well before multicellularity evolved.

And clever experiments have shown that in the test tube, single-celled life can evolve the beginnings of multicellularity in just a few hundred generations—an evolutionary instant.

#biology #evolution
https://www.science.org/content/article/momentous-transition-multicellular-life-may-not-have-been-so-hard-after-all