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 ...

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 ...

Unicellular organisms show surprising complexity In a paper appearing in Nature Genetics, researchers discover that in more "primitive" unicellular organisms, both the adenine and the cytosine bases ...

Scientists are discovering ways in which single cells might have evolved traits that entrenched them into group behavior, paving the way for multicellular life. These discoveries could shed light on ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists discover microRNAs in the unicellular green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This is the first finding of microRNAs in a unicellular organism. An international collaboration of researchers, ...