Tag: Will Ratcliff

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A new paper describing the results of a yeast evolution experiment has been published in Evolution. Jordan Gulli exposed nascent multicellular “snowflake yeast” to an environment in which solitary multicellular clusters experienced low survival. In response, snowflake yeast evolved to form cooperative groups composed of thousands of multicellular clusters.

Gulli et al. 2019 Fig. 2
Figure 2 from Gulli et al. 2019. Evolution of proteinaceous aggregates that bind many multicellular clusters. When subjected to strong settling selection, snowflake yeast evolved to form cooperative aggregates composed of hundreds of clusters (A). A composite image (B) reveals the aggregates are composed of both protein (C, green, Qubit fluorescent protein stain) and DNA (D, red, propidium iodide). Cells embedded within the aggregate are shown in blue (E, Cell Tracker Blue). Scale bars are 500 μm.

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A new paper using analytical and simulation models to explore the relationships between particle-level heritability and collective-level heritability during major transitions has been published in BMC Biology:

Herron et al. 2018 Figure 3
Figure 3 from Herron et al. 2018.  Relative heritability of four collective-­level traits to cell-­level heritability for size.

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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.

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