Physics of the Yeasts

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There's actually a whole lot more crazy synthetic biology that tony is up to you. So, um, so initially, what all of our yeasts that are revolving to become microscopic do as they make more and more elongate cells. And then we see the surprising break from the sort of linear march toward slightly increased size. We see things that are orders of magnitude bigger with just a little bit more cell length. But i canno also want to get back to the tite physics of this. I'm sorry, never really went down that path. Got off that, off that trail. But yes, let's complete the physics discussion. Ok.

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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