As organisms develop from embryos, groups of cells migrate and reshape themselves to form all manner of complex tissues. There are no anatomical molds shaped like lungs, livers or other tissues for ...

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single cells and forming multicellular structures. This ability to alternate ...

Understanding how cells within and around a tumor interact provides key information about a cancer's architecture, a patient's immune response to the disease and even how susceptible the cancer may be ...

Just when you thought biology had its rules completely figured out, science goes ahead and throws the ultimate curveball.

Life emerged on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago. The “primordial soup theory” proposes that chemicals floating in pools of water, in the presence of sunlight and electrical discharge, spontaneously ...

A deep dive into macroalgae genetics has uncovered the genetic underpinnings that enabled macroalgae, or 'seaweed,' to evolve multicellularity. Three lineages of macroalgae developed multicellularity ...

The design of synthetic developmental programs for multicellular mammalian systems is a cornerstone of synthetic biology. The programs hinge on the construction of gene regulatory circuits that ...

Bacterial superorganisms must evolve defenses to fight off infections, and microbiologists found that they use a weapons cache coincidentally similar to that of the human immune system. “The [DGR ...