Multicellular Yeast!

[ajfranke]

http://www.newscientist.com/article...ke-evolutionary-leap-to-multicellularity.html

Not sure how this will affect the "Cell Count Needed" column on Mr. Malty, but it sure seems interesting.

 

[medusa1066]

Eventually, these multicellular yeast will do the cell count for you...and all of your sparging!

 

[DregAddict]

Interesting story. I would like to see the results they get with the algae, as well as further results with the yeast. I am inclined to agree with the sceptics that the genes for multicellular life may have been retained in yeast and that the artificial selection in this experiment is not completely indicative of the natural evolutionary processes that lead to multicellular organisms.

 

[a_potter]

Hopefully these yeast do not get out of the lab. I can only imagine Some wild yeast blob reaching up to pop my airlock of and help itself to my wort.

 

[weirdboy]

How is it that yeast were once multicellular? I hadn't heard that before.

 

[DeafSmith]

Hopefully these yeast do not get out of the lab. I can only imagine Some wild yeast blob reaching up to pop my airlock of and help itself to my wort.

In Minnesota, yeast pitch you.

 

[weirdboy]

Just FYI, MI is Michigan.

Flint, MI is the place of "Roger and Me" fame. Also I believe Dr. Kevorkian was from around there.


MN is Minnesota.

 

[DeafSmith]

Just FYI, MI is Michigan.

Flint, MI is the place of "Roger and Me" fame. Also I believe Dr. Kevorkian was from around there.


MN is Minnesota.

The linked article said the research was done at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.

 

[weirdboy]

Ah gotcha. I am kind of slow.

 

[jd3]

Ah gotcha. I am kind of slow.

Did you know Los Angeles was in Canada?

 

[Tinga]

and the government wants to slash the Universities budget....

 

[Tinga]

er wait.... so these yeast aren't totally a multicellular organism. They're just kinda a bunch of single celled organisms that clump together and work as a community kinda. is that right? I'm a marketing major.

 

[Brewitt]

How is it that yeast were once multicellular? I hadn't heard that before.

Science nerd alert:

So, I haven't read the primary research article but I looked at the new scientist article in the link. I'm a yeast researcher and have worked on a yeast form called pseudohyphal. Some fungi grow as hyphae which have many nuclei in one but these are simply many cells that are connected at the point of division, that is they don't separate. As a consequence they form long filaments. Some yeast isolated from the wild exhibit this property when they are starved. This form of yeast can actually penetrate a solid surface like the agar in a Petri dish. It is thought to be an adaptation to help them look for nutrients. This capacity is bred out of laboratory strains and probably brewing strain by selecting for desirable roperties so it was only on recent history that it was rediscovered. I presume this is what the researchers are looking at.

 

[ni*]

I think you've misunderstood his question (although interestingly enough, I've also done research on pseudohyphal growth in yeast).

weirdboy, the article is a bit misleading when it says that yeast were once multicellular, albeit in a way that popular science reporting very often is. What it means it that the ancestors of yeast (which probably weren't especially yeast-like) were multicellular organisms, and the that yeast unicellularity is a fairly new trait (on an evolutionary scale). This sort of "reversion" (from our multicellular biased point of view) happens pretty often in nature.

The critics are entirely right, in my opinion: while this is an interesting study, it probably has almost nothing to do with the original evolution of multicellularity. As Brewitt says, the biochemical pathways controlling hyphal growth are largely still present in yeast -- they're just "turned off".

 

[Bearsmith]

In Soviet Russia, Yeast ferments you.

 

[weirdboy]

I think you've misunderstood his question (although interestingly enough, I've also done research on pseudohyphal growth in yeast).

weirdboy, the article is a bit misleading when it says that yeast were once multicellular, albeit in a way that popular science reporting very often is. What it means it that the ancestors of yeast (which probably weren't especially yeast-like) were multicellular organisms, and the that yeast unicellularity is a fairly new trait (on an evolutionary scale). This sort of "reversion" (from our multicellular biased point of view) happens pretty often in nature.

The critics are entirely right, in my opinion: while this is an interesting study, it probably has almost nothing to do with the original evolution of multicellularity. As Brewitt says, the biochemical pathways controlling hyphal growth are largely still present in yeast -- they're just "turned off".

OK so basically what you are saying is that multicellarlarity is an existing genetic trait in yeast, but those genes are dormant, so to speak.

So, it would be a more interesting experiment if the results could be reproduced in a single-cell organism that didn't already have those genes.