One random mutation powers multicellular life?
The Darwinian begins to sound like an overconfident historian. From ScienceDaily: All it took was one mutation more than 600 million years ago. With that random act, a new protein function was born that helped our single-celled ancestor transition into an organized multicellular organism. This release features Prehoda’s lab’s work on choranoflagellates (featured here and here already). But then notice how it all gets qualified: Prehoda and colleagues then used ancestral protein reconstruction, a technique devised at the UO by co-author Joseph W. Thornton, a biologist now at the University of Chicago. By using gene sequencing and computational methods to move backward in the evolutionary tree, researchers can see molecular changes and infer how proteins performed in the deep past. Read More ›