Are You Bringing Back to Life a Different Kind of Multi Cellular Yeast?

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Yeasts are unicellular, but they're living on the edge of wanting to be multi cellular. They've lost much of their geno that we knowa multi cycophonga. It's not completely surprising that you can sort of prod them in different ways and mutate them and get them back to being multi cellular. And this is very rare an. In this palat of multi silarity, you don't see unislar descendants of animals or plants running round nature. But fonga seem to do this all the time.

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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