The Anarobic and Mixetrophi Yeasts Have Gotten Bigger Than Their Ancestor

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The anarobic yeast evolved to get ina 20 thousand times bigger than their ancestor. The arobic and mixetrophi yeast, which can use oxygen, are actually pegged just a few times biggerthan their ancestor. They don't do anything xsize, which is kind of neat it i think it's a nice follow up to the oxygen work ta i mentioned before,. A nice long term evolution experiment.

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.

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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.

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