The world would look very different without multicellular organisms—take away the plants, animals, fungi, and seaweed, and Earth starts to look like a wetter, greener version of Mars. But precisely ...

A team of scientists, led by the University of Sheffield in the UK and Boston College in the U.S., has found a microfossil in the Scottish Highlands which contains two distinct cell types and could be ...

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the ...

A deep dive into macroalgae genetics has uncovered the genetic underpinnings that enabled macroalgae, or 'seaweed,' to evolve multicellularity. Three lineages of macroalgae developed multicellularity ...

Coordination between individuals is a fundamental challenge in collectives, and this is just as true for a country's government as it is for simple multicellular organisms. How does a group of many ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

Life’s leap from single-celled to multicellular organisms marks a pivotal moment in evolutionary history. This transformation laid the foundation for the complex life forms we see today. By studying ...

A giant, trumpet-shaped cell that skulks in the bottom of ponds has given scientists a new clue about how single-celled creatures may have taken the first steps towards evolving into multicellular ...

In the multicellular soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, some cells start producing lots of antibiotics after mutations delete big chunks of their genomes. Now a computer model has helped to ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single cells and forming multicellular structures. This ability to alternate ...

Marine bacteria normally seen as single cells join together as a “microscopic snow globe” to consume bulky floating carbohydrates. Close your eyes and imagine bacteria. Perhaps you’re picturing our ...