10 August 2011

Scientists identify possible smoking-gun for multicellular life

by Kate Melville

Researchers have created an analog of what they think the first multicellular cooperation on Earth might have looked like, showing that yeast cells - in an environment that requires them to work harder for their food - grow and reproduce better in multicellular clumps than singly.

The research team, led by Harvard professor Andrew Murray, showed that in environments where the yeast's sugar food source is dilute and the number of cells is small, the ability to clump together allowed cells that otherwise would have remained hungry and static to grow and divide.

The experiments, detailed in the journal PLoS Biology, used the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is commonly used in bread-making and has long been a model organism for understanding single-celled life. Murray and his colleagues devised a series of experiments that presented two problems for the yeast cells to solve if they were to take in enough food to grow and divide: the first was how to change their food from an unusable form to a usable form; the second was how to actually take in this food.

The researchers used a solution of sucrose - a combination of glucose and fructose. Yeast lives on sugar, but the sucrose can't get through the membrane that surrounds the cell. So the yeast makes an enzyme called invertase to chop the sucrose into glucose and fructose, each of which can enter the cell using gate-keeping molecules, called transporters, that form part of the membrane.

The second problem was how to get the glucose and fructose from the place where they were split apart by invertase to the transporters in the cell membrane. The only way to bridge the gap is through diffusion, an inefficient process. The researchers calculated that once a cell makes invertase and chops the larger sugar down to usable bits, only one sugar molecule in 100 would be captured by the cell that made it.

They also calculated that, working alone, a single yeast cell in a dilute solution of sucrose would never take in enough glucose and fructose to be able to grow and divide. But by cooperating, clumps of yeast in that same solution might have a chance.

With several cells in proximity - all releasing invertase to create smaller sugars - these cooperating yeast cells would increase the density of those sugars near the clump, increasing the chances that each cell could take in enough to grow and divide. And when the researchers tested these hypotheses they found that the strain which clumped cells together was growing and dividing, while the yeast cells living alone were not.

The work offers one explanation as to why single-celled organisms might have initially banded together deep in the history of life, Murray believes. "Because there is an advantage to sticking together under these circumstances, and because we know that lots of single-celled organisms make enzymes to liberate goods from their environment, this may be the evolutionary force that led to multicellularity." Although, he continued, "short of inventing time travel and going back several billion years to see if this is how it happened... this is going to remain speculation."

Related:
"Lost" experiment hints at a richer primordial broth
Clay bubbles may have nurtured self-organizing precursors to life
Bacteria found to exhibit anticipatory behavior
Intriguing evidence of charitable behavior in bacteria
More evidence for asteroids creating life on Earth
Biologists plot concept of "organismality"

Source: Public Library of Science