Is This the Beginning of True Cellular Differenciation and Expression?

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Ratcliffe: Yeast could be hint of the beginning of true cellular differentiation and expression. He says a lot of this stuff is stuff that i would never have been able to predict before doing the experiment. Ratcliffe hopes his experiment goes on for at least 30 years, but he's willing to hand it over to someone else if they can solve aging by then.

We’ve talked about the very origin of life, but certain transitions along its subsequent history were incredibly important. Perhaps none more so than the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms, which made possible an incredible diversity of organisms and structures. Will Ratcliff studies the physics that constrains multicellular structures, examines the minute changes in certain yeast cells that allows them to become multicellular, and does long-term evolution experiments in which multicellularity spontaneously evolves and grows. We can’t yet create life from non-life, but we can reproduce critical evolutionary steps in the lab.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

William Ratcliff received his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. He is currently Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. Among his awards are a Packard Fellowship and being named in Popular Science‘s “Brilliant 10” of 2016.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.