Strength in numbers
Harvard researchers studying the same yeast used in beer brewing and bread making have gained new insights into one of the key steps between life’s earliest beginning and the development of complex animals like humans: the rise of multicellular life. A team of researchers led by Andrew Murray, the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics, found that yeast cells that clumped together were able to more effectively manipulate and absorb sugars in their environment than were similar cells that lived singly. The experiments showed that in environments where the yeast’s sugar food source is dilute and the number of cells is small, the ability to clump together allowed cells that otherwise would have remained hungry and static to grow and divide. Murray said the work offers one explanation as to why single-celled organisms might have initially banded together deep in the history of life, though it’s impossible to prove conclusively that this...