Pythagorean said:
I thought the centrifugation was only to collect the heaviest globs of cells. Thereby selecting for those clusters.ryan_m_b said:Interesting, I wonder how the centrifugation represents real life? Perhaps strong tides or water pressure?
ryan_m_b said:I wonder how the centrifugation represents real life?
Evo said:I thought the centrifugation was only to collect the heaviest globs of cells. Thereby selecting for those clusters.
Borek said:It doesn't, it just adds kind of selection. Evolution doesn't care about whether selection has any real life meaning, it just follows higher survivability path.
Ken Natton said:Is it not the usual supposition that multi-cellular life evolved because it improves the facility of individual genes to achieve maximum self-replication? The suggestion then is that, given enough time, the lab based yeast might have achieved this in any case, it just might have taken a few million years longer than the scientists had. Introducing an artificial environmental pressure just jockeyed the process along a bit. The point of the exercise, perhaps, was not to explain exactly how multi-cellular life actually first evolved, but just to highlight the fundamental possibility for it to do so given the right circumstances, and perhaps to provide a small answer to those who like to claim that evolutionary theory is not falsifiable and thus not scientific.
ryan_m_b said:It may or may not have been the point of the experiment to study mechanisms by which single celled organisms can evolve multicellularity but whenever it comes to experiments like this I tend to be overly critical and think "well ok but what's that got to do with real life?".
Pythagorean said:From a theoretical biology point of view, this is very interesting to me whether it reflects evolutionary history or not; it tells more about the living system dynamics (especially if changesbin expression are observed and correlated with te transition)
ryan_m_b said:I do find it interesting, just wonder how it relates to evolution IRL.
The purpose of studying lab yeast going multicellular is to understand the molecular mechanisms and evolutionary processes involved in the transition from single-celled to multicellular organisms. This research can also shed light on the origins of multicellularity in other organisms.
Scientists induce multicellularity in lab yeast by manipulating environmental conditions such as nutrient availability and stress levels, as well as genetic modifications. This allows them to observe how different factors affect the transition to multicellularity.
The potential benefits of lab yeast going multicellular include increased resilience to environmental stresses, improved efficiency in nutrient uptake and utilization, and the ability to form complex structures for specialized functions. These benefits may also have implications for biotechnology and industrial applications.
One potential drawback is that lab yeast may not accurately represent natural multicellular organisms, as they have been specifically bred and manipulated in controlled laboratory environments. This could limit the generalizability of findings to other organisms. Additionally, it may be ethically questionable to manipulate organisms in this way.
Some current theories about the evolution of multicellularity in lab yeast include the "snowball effect" hypothesis, which suggests that multicellularity emerged gradually through the accumulation of small genetic changes, and the "big leap" hypothesis, which proposes that a major genetic mutation or event triggered the switch to multicellularity in a single step.