Long-term experimental evolution in brewer’s yeast reveals how the transition to simple multicellularity can drive ecological divergence and maintain diversity.
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References
Bonner, J.T. The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection (Princeton Univ. Press, 1988). This book explores the evolution of complex life, with a focus on the role of organismal size.
Bonner, J. T. Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales (Princeton Univ. Press, 2007). This book focuses explicitly on the role of size in ecology and evolution.
Ratcliff, W. C. et al. Experimental evolution of multicellularity. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 1595–1600 (2012). This paper reports the de novo evolution of snowflake yeast from unicellular relatives in response to selection for larger size.
Bozdag, G. O. et al. De novo evolution of macroscopic multicellularity. Nature 617, 747–754 (2023). This paper describes the first approximately 3,000 generations of the MuLTEE; in one treatment, snowflake yeast evolve to be 20,000-fold larger.
Bozdag, G. O. et al. Oxygen suppression of macroscopic multicellularity. Nat. Commun. 12, 2838 (2021). This study explores the trade-off between large size and fast growth created by oxygen.
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This is a summary of: Pineau, R. M. et al. Emergence and maintenance of stable coexistence during a long-term multicellular evolution experiment. Nat. Ecol. Evol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02367-y (2024).
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Multicellularity drives ecological diversity in a long-term evolution experiment. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 856–857 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02391-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02391-y