Mind-blowing Experiment Evolved Multicellular Life In Just 600 days 

Such behavior is quite common in Fungi, but the fascinating part is that through these conditions, the scientists basically “unlocked” hidden functionality that we normally never see in yeast. They made it behave like other fungi

I remember a study, over 10 years ago. They had single cell organisms in a petri dish, happily munching and dividing. The scientists introduced a predator cell, and after many generations, the original cells began clumping into multi-cellular form, able to fight off the predator cells. The new multi-cell life eventually settled on 8-cell clusters, which was big enough to defend itself, but small enough to still have all cells able to feed at the same time. Then the scientists removed the predators cells. The surviving single cell organisms, and the new 8-cell clusters, continued to multiply as different species.

The lack of oxygen being a catalyst for cell evolution actually makes sense. We know that Earth has gone through a few oxygen-deprived cycles in the past; if those timelines match up with explosions in the fossil records, I think it would lend serious credence to these experimental results.

Last time I was this early I was still a single-celled organism

this is kind of a dubious experiment; yeast is after all member of the fungi kingdom, and fungi can be multicellular. Maybe yeast has multicellular ancestors, or even a multicellular form that can be adaptively triggered.

TY Anton for being as informatime behind a microscope as you are behind a telescope.

This reminds me of Kleiber's Law-a creature's basal metabolic rate scales at roughly (3/4) power of its mass. This is one of the chief explanations for deep sea gigantism. It really isn't hard to create a circumstance in which multicellular life provides a distinct benefit.

Yeast is pretty adaptable, so I'm not surprised that it could clump together. But it's ability to specialize individual cells is pretty amazing. And I don't think this has any impact on the Fermi paradox unless they can prove that this is a caused by a mutation. It's more likely to be a product of altered gene expression. If this is a characteristic of yeast that is normally repressed, then it doesn't seem to have much to say about how likely it was to have evolved in the first place.

It seems more like a colony of cells, nothing that we generally consider "multicellular". It's certainly not a new life form.

When Anton says the word "hypothesis", my brain makes happy chemicals.

An entire planet, even an entire regional ecosystem would not require oxygen deprivation either. Say an underground lava tube system or cave system whose oxygen became limited due to collapse, or water, air or growth medium became mildly toxic etc. What a fantastic study! Thanks Anton as always! 🦋✨

My theory is that some early bacteria saw an episode of Voltron and decided it looked super awesome.

Be interesting to see what happens if they slowly over time reintroduce oxygen

This gives an entire new meaning to "yeast infection". Great video by the way.

Yes I caught this video when it first came on. It's the little things that make my day better

Stress in the environment forces cooperation. I like the idea. Makes sense. Life does not evolve unless there is a reason to change.

Best... content...on... RU-vid 😄As always, bro, you do a great job and I'm always gonna be here to support it. Gettin' my wonderful person hoodie next month 😁Thank you for your hard work!

Multicellular life needed oxygen to be possible but it is true that it started at a time when oxygen (provided by cyanobacteria) was scarce and possibly only local (around cyanobacteria colonies). So maybe the experiment has woken up some mechanisms from that era hidden in the genome of the organisms.

It was a nice surprise to see my footage in this video.

Hugely exciting. The comparison between collaborative colonies, multiplying successfully in stable conditions, might show us how codependent single cell life forms eventually become symbiotic and amalgamate into multicellular forms as we observe them in adversity. I think it's important to distinguish between a colony which is made up of single cell organisms of one type and codependent communities of different organisms.

I had a grade 10 teacher who brilliantly had the class each build their own glass encased environment to mimic the beginning of life with proteins and rocks and then he electrified them, each one. I'd love to say we discovered how life began, of course I'd be lying. What I discovered was how to think and hope and believe and love Science. We were working on the greatest experiments of all time and we were 15, that was one of the greatest class lessons of my entire life. Thank you Mr. Campbell of Overlea SS in Toronto back in the late 70's early 80's!!!

Single cell amoeba "hold my beer" !! 😆

Thank you, Anton. I’ve heard of this in passing, in broad generalities, but this is the first video or article I’ve found with any useful detail. You do good work. 👍

Evolution rules :-) Oh i can already hear the apologists cry 😂😂

I have to say thank you and your team for all the awesome videos . In a world of lies and deception it is a great honor to have folks like you working hard and sharing this intriguing content . Anton is Mr. Reliable !👍

Please this for a next topic for Anton: lack of oxygen seems the key too in the Prof. Thomas Seyfried videos: cancer as a mitrochondrial metabolic disease. Why we are so often suffer from uncontrolled cell growing? Seams to me that both topics are strong related.

would love a video on kefir and the unique microorganism colony used to make it

This has been done before, but this is the fastest I think it's ever been shown to happen in the lab. Plus, it's much larger and more impressive this time, too. Quite impressive!

Key question is how much change in DNA/genes occurred. There is a chance that yeast devolved from a multicellular organism, perhaps because in a less protected but oxygen rich environment, staying single was sn evolutionary advantage (i.e. more rapid replication), over being multicellular....

Thank you Anton so much for your videos!!!

fantastic video anton this is unbelievably interesting

This is the most underrated youtube channel on the whole inter-webs. Thanks for all your hard work.

But the real question is: what kind of beer will this multicellular yeast make?

It still blows my mind to think what was once lifeless matter, no different to any other matter, evolved over billions of years to become us.

Anton, your channel is one of the very best on YT. You never fail to amaze.

Very cool topic. Thanks Anton.

I always thought the generally popular hypothesis was that larger (multicellular life) was harder to _eat_ by other single celled life, so if you had a single celled predator that was about as large as you could get with single cells, multicellular would be the way to go.

It seems likelier that the yeast, at least some of the cells, already had genes capable to handle this environment either from an ancestor a long time ago or from some other organism. It is well established that single cell life can incorporate DNA/RNA from other species.

Thanks Anton, super interesting stuff that I hadn't heard about!

A very good episode! Thanks Anton.

That's how deadpool gained his powers. He was put in a very limited oxygen environment. Lol

I'm pretty sure I did this using Wyeast 1728 a few years ago. After a few iterations of reclaiming yeast or pitching new wort on old yeast cake I would start to get large (size of the head of a ballpoint pen) rigid clumps of cells that resisted shearing or crushing. I always just took this as an indication that I was selecting for something other than flavor profile so I would just terminate the line and buy new stock for my next batch.

Wow!!! Fermi Paradox people will love this.

Great video! Fascinating information with so many applications😊

Great video, I actually studied the first experiment myself, good to see more discoveries on that subject. I would warn agaisnt using stock footage on your explanations. Some of them are not directly related to the subject and could make things a bit confusing.

Clever scientists. That experiment would never have occurred to me. Thanks, Anton.

Would love a continueation of this experiment where they add a light source and the closer you are to it the more oxygen/nutrients you get... i wonder if some ultra simple eyes and movement could evolve

The world is lucky to have you. You're a wonderful person!!!

This just gave me some insane ideas.

Whoa. Mind blowing stuff dude. You rock much love.

Always fascinating videos Anton. The wonders of the microscopic world as well as the galactic world are all amazing.

Great work - as usual !

Interesting paper. My understanding is that the conventional wisdom is that increased O2 levels facilitated the evolution of multicellular life with higher metabolism.

Super Exciting! This step allows other science to study the DNA/RNA function at possibly a very close point to how it all started to program... (it should be part of the kernel programming of compiling code... for an analogy to computing). This will allow us to discover evolution, but also how/why our DNA does what it does in the order it unfolds it's programming... including "junk" proteins on the chain... This is an amazing step for us as humans.. we should rejoice!!!! Our future offspring will benefit greatly. 😀

You look tierd Anton. Hope all is well. Thank you for the excellent videos as always!

*WOW - THAT WAS INTERESTING* as others have said - THANK YOU - for bringing this to our attention.

There might be another explanation (?): Could it be, that the yeast "remembers" old genes it developed quite some time ago and 'normally' doesn't use? It would be convincing if we can achieve similar results with more 'primitive' cells; ...

interesting to see evidence that multicellular organisms might come directly from colonial organisms with biological castes, into eusociality

Don't forget the evolution of the prokaryotic (without a nuclei) to eukaryotic (with nuclei) cells and large structure development.

The binding together stops the individual cells spreading out, reducing potential food and making predation more of an issue. If there is no issue with food or predators sticking together can be fine as long as everyone gets fed.

Could it be possible that yeast has always had the ability to create colonies, and it's just preferred to be dormant? That could mean that older life on earth might have taken a lot longer anyway regardless of how fast yeast can adapt.

So cool, thanks for sharing!

In software there are numerous examples of comlex emergent phenomenon. The main example is Conway's 'life' but there are many more examples. A similar program called tierra (i think that's right) mimics cells using numerical rules functioning as a computer program that could copy itself in a simulated memory bank. Organisms began to evolve during the very first test run of the program without alterations.

I'd be more impressed by developing a single cell life from a chemical stew, but we take what we can get cause that's life.

Everyday science takes another step towards realizing the reality: life is a natural part of Universe. (Universe x Time = Life).

The bridges between physics, chemistry, and biology are fascinating

Seems like any environment factor that favoured multicellular forms would do. Really fascinating Anton, thanks for this!

Anton Petrov, Thanks for finding and sharing things and looking at some of the larger questions. The word is "apoptosis" for "programmed cell death" In humans this happens to remove cells that are near failing, without bursting and hurting those nearby. The big thing you sort of missed, is that there are many questions that can only be answered by looking at things over long time periods. And doing the hard work. I get bothered by groups like Google and the GPTs who only try to answer questions they can answer in two seconds. Their focus is trivia questions, not deep ones. If the GPTs would spend months, years, decades on problems, they could probably get useful answers, but they just like to "chat", rather than "study", "work", "research", "collaborate", "contribute to the greater good". Humans are going through this same process of more complex organizations. It is not coincidental that organization and organism share the same root. There are tens of thousands of global issues like "evolution" or "black holes" or "climate change" or "shared knowledge for all" on the Internet. And they bubble up from ad hoc organizations serving their own needs and usually falling back into chaos. For the last 25 years of the Internet Foundation, I try to monitor and understand why human organizations fail to mature, why all commercial firms reach fairly small (10s to 1000s of $ Billions) then stagnate and quit evolving. I think you will find that inorganic (non CHNOS) life can also exist, and it is only because it is different and operates on million year scales that we cannot see and understand it. Take a look at the DNA, RNA, protein, genome, ome and chemical databases on the Internet. Each group, each website or web network is eclectic and making up its own rules. So when the different efforts try to combine at global scale, the pieces won't fit without a lot of effort. I try to find these earl and give them policies and ways of organizing that will allow the many separate efforts to work at global (and heliospheric scale). So look at volcanic vents, times before oxygen was readily available, in places where their is a lot of stirring and pressure. and the efficient organizational methods will evolve. Then they need to last long enough at global scale to reproduce and effect others. It is just barely possible there are other kinds of life besides DNA life on Earth. Someone would need to know what to look for and how. Life on Mars? We are too prideful if we think it could only happen with our flavor of CHNOS life. Those chemical reactions, just look at the periodic table, there is nothing special about life from CHNOS, except those are abundant and there was plenty of time for self-replication to evolve. The question to ask is how the pattern is stored and why some things reproduce with exactly the same copies in every generation. There are many more variations in humans than our simple "all humans are identical". Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

I can see a science fiction story now. Scientists intend to create single celled life. After weekend, they come back and find a herd of elephants in (what's left of) the lab. "That went better than expected!"

Fascinating, thank you Anton

Nice video broham. Well done.

Yeast has always been fascinating to me. If you make beer in a transparent container you will see them make large chunks of colonies and swim around the liquid like multicelular creatures. If you add sugar to warm water and then add yeast, it will move to where the sugar is (at the bottom) in few minutes. That suggests that they cooperate by making limb-like structures for synchronized motion.

This is yeast flocculation. Every homebrewer has performed this experiment, whether they know it or not.

Thanks for the science videos my dude.

As always, a pleasure to watch you

Interesting that oxygen deprivation could be one of the things making the jump. I am trying to think how that affected earth. Since the environment didn't have much oxygen until the great oxygenation event could it have been the only catalyst for prompting multicellular evolution? Were there multi called organisms prior to the great oxygenation event?

As an Atheist I've had Creationists ask me how I could believe that single cells eventually lead to people. I now feel incredibly vindicated.

Genuine wholesome person. Fantastic 😊

Thanks for fascinating new information which further demonstrates the probability of natural selection and development of complex life.

It's not hard to imagine the mechanisms behind cancer being those behind the 1st multicellular organisms multiplying out of control, leading ultimately to the evolution of animal life. As these blobs of cells grew larger & larger, the 'cancer mechanism' would kick in, causing cells to mutate, leading to specializations. These specializations were then selected for, evolutionarily-speaking, & then co-opted by the larger organism to serve a specific function...

That's amazing. A process that we previously assumed to take millions of years was sped up to such a degree

Great, interesting video,thanks 😊😊

Always great stuff

The video title should have been "It's official, God is Dead"

If, as I believe, intelligent life exist in the universe, it still seems very unlikely that any sort of meaningful communication between different instances of that intelligence could ever take place... because of the distances combined with the maximum speed of exchanging information.

Thank you for the great videos.

Stunning experiment. By getting into larger structure, there is created a local difference between internal cells and surface cells. That this then drives so fast to specialization of activation is both intuitive and stunning.

Certain religious types are about to be very upset.

And after billions of year they develop technology that allows them to make videos of slapping , farts and cats

Interesting, Anton!

I’ve got a feeling that this outcome was merely an incidental discovery in the quest to produce the perfect beer.

Likely what was accomplished was discovering an inherent trait yeast has. How often has yeast been deprived of oxygen in nature over the eons. My guess, a lot.

The theists are gonna so triggered 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣🥰🤣

fantastic,, liked and shared ofcourse

These critters in this experiment have done more than I, the embodiment of the essence of this experiment, have done in 600 days. Incredible. Thank you again, Wonderful Person Anton.

Considering what took nature billions of years to do, took scientists 600 days to somewhat recreate, it's kind of impressive when you think about it.

Creation myths are practicaly dead at this point

It does leave the riddle why multi cellular life did not appear for so long, even though single cell life existed for a billion years.

During the Mesoproterozoic (aka the Boring Billion) from 1.8 to 0.8 Billion years ago, this was a time when oxygen levels were very low consistently for a long time in the oceans. It likely prevented proliferation and diversification of life but, at the same time - as experiments like this show - contributed to the development of the first multicellular life! How cool!

x to doubt. I'll look into it but these studies have been plagued with systemic problems for a long time.