Synthetic Biology: Is It Safe to Say That It's Just One Gen You Have to Remove to Make a Snowflake?

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In the very first experiments, we didn't know what was going to happen. And within a few weeks, these populations had all formed these beautiful little groups that we call snowflakies. We came up that term actually because, a they settle much like a sort of snow settling through the liquid media. They have this cool fractile like growth form where if you break off a small branch itself, similar to to the morphology of the larger group,. You can imagine that they're growing as a tree. It's super easy. But that's probably true for most unipyclo organisms.

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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