Scientists Coax Brewer's Yeast into Making Evolutionary Leap to Multicellularity
Yeast Culture spike55151 via Flickr Hundreds of millions of years ago, unicellular organisms made the leap to multicellularity, enabling what we know now as complex life and otherwise making a huge leap forward for evolution. Now, researchers have coaxed single-celled yeast into doing the same thing--in just a few weeks. That multicellular leap has occurred many times (that we know of) since life on this planet began climbing toward the complex organisms we see today, but the last leap to multicellularity (again, that we know of) took place some 200 million years ago. Researchers at the University of Minnesota thought this mechanism might be easier to understand and observe if they reproduced it in a slightly more modern laboratory, so they attempted to evolve unicellular yeast into multicellular colonies. And they found that it was surprisingly easy to do. To push the yeast toward this evolution, they spun common brewer's yeast in...