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The paper describing the genetics of the multicellular Chlamydomonas reinhardtii strain that evolved in response to selection on settling rate is published in Royal Society Open Science:

Figure 3 from Herron et al. 2018. Results of phylostratigraphy analysis of differentially expressed genes. The y-axis represents the log odds of the observed degree of over/underrepresentation relative to genome-wide frequencies. The Bonferroni-corrected p-values result from a hypergeometric test (α = 0.0025, equivalent to a false discovery rate of 1%) performed in GeneMerge v. 1.4. ‘n.s.’, not significant.

Abstract:

The evolution of multicellularity was a major transition in evolution and set the stage for unprecedented increases in complexity, especially in land plants and animals. Here, we explore the genetics underlying a de novo origin of multicellularity in a microbial evolution experiment carried out on the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We show that large-scale changes in gene expression underlie the transition to a multicellular life cycle. Among these, changes to genes involved in cell cycle and reproductive processes were overrepresented, as were changes to C. reinhardtii-specific and volvocine-specific genes. These results suggest that the genetic basis for the experimental evolution of multicellularity in C. reinhardtii has both lineage-specific and shared features, and that the shared features have more in common with C. reinhardtii’s relatives among the volvocine algae than with other multicellular green algae or land plants.

 

Herron, M. D., W. C. Ratcliff, J. Boswell, & F. Rosenzweig. 2018. Genetics of a de novo origin of undifferentiated multicellularity. Royal Society Open Science 5: 180912. (pdf) (Data on Dryad)