MicroRNAs (miRNAs) — a class of small RNAs with a role in the regulation of gene expression — had until now been found only in multicellular organisms. Now, Wang, Qi and colleagues provide the first ...

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a ...

An international team of researchers has achieved an unprecedented milestone: the creation of mouse stem cells capable of generating a fully developed mouse using genetic tools from a unicellular ...

At some point, organisms changed and grew from a single cell into one made up of many cells. But how that happened is not well understood. New work by graduate candidate Jonathan Featherston of the ...

Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii, a close cousin of animals. In red, the membranes and in blue the nuclei with their DNA. The image was obtained ...

Throughout the history of life on Earth, multicellular life evolved from single cells numerous times, but explaining how this happened is one of the major evolutionary puzzles of our time. However, ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract For unicellular organisms, a lack of effects of local species richness on ecosystem function has been proposed due to their locally high ...

A ubiquitous but little-known marine organism, the choanoflagellate, is the last one-celled ancestor of humans and provides insight into how cells learned to assemble into multicelled organisms. The ...

Cassandra Extavour and her colleagues, who study the origins of multicellular organisms and the evolution of cooperation, still disagree on the meaning of key concepts such as cooperation, competition ...

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 ...

If you look at the world around you now - at the plants, animals, and the people around you, it's easy to take for granted our multicellular existence. Life didn't always look like this. In fact, way ...

Researchers have discovered and characterized a new organism that will help scientists understand the molecular mechanisms and ancestral genetic toolkit that enabled animals and fungi to evolve into ...