What's a Yeast?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Yeast are a singes caled fungus. And i care about them because they 're a really wonderful model organism for laboratory experiments. We'rein the mddle of a pandemic and everyone is baking bread. So we're all familiar s we yeast. But so this is a, so it's a fungus a, which is a, wut? What kingdom is that in? That's a plant. The yeast i we use is service. Don't worry. We'll go back to the east. All right, gooditand in any case, although, ok, you can't decide. I it's hard for me to explain our change in thinking about oxygen without

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.