From Nature: “Transdifferentiation is the conversion of a cell type present in one tissue or organ into a cell type from another tissue or organ without going through a pluripotent cell state. Transdifferentiation between some cell types can occur naturally in response to injury and can be induced experimentally.”
From the abstract of an interesting preprint:
… these analyses offer no support for the homology of sponge choanocytes and choanoflagellates, nor for the view that the first multicellular animals were simple balls of cells with limited capacity to differentiate. Instead, our results are consistent with the first animal cell being able to transition between multiple states in a manner similar to modern transdifferentiating and stem cells.Shunsuke Sogabe, William L. Hatleberg, Kevin M. Kocot, Tahsha E. Say, Daniel Stoupin, Kathrein E. Roper, Selene L. Fernandez-Valverde, Sandie M. Degnan and Bernard M. Degnan, “Pluripotency and the origin of animal multicellularity” at bioarxiv
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Before you go: “Interspecies communication” strategy between gut bacteria and mammalian hosts’ genes described
Researchers: Cells Have A Repair Crew That Fixes Local Leaks
Researchers: How The Immune System “Thinks”
Researcher: Mathematics Sheds Light On “Unfathomably Complex” Cellular Thinking
How do cells in the body know where they are supposed to be?
Researchers A Kill Cancer Code Is Embedded in Every Cell
How Do Cells Interpret The “Dizzying” Communications Pathways In Multicellular Life Forms?
and
Cell atlases reveal extreme complexity at biology’s frontiers
Well then, that’s quite amazing
I would think that would be a prediction of Intelligent Design- part of the discontinuity prediction.
What else is new?
That’s just another example of “I knew it” and “I told you so”.
How serious is this?
“microbiologists have extensively studied single bacterial cell structures (Gahlmann and Moerner 2014) and their molecular mechanisms (Liu et al. 2015; Dangkulwanich et al. 2014) using powerful microscopes to understand the flow and processing of information required by the cell to maintain stability and to perform in a collective fashion.”
“Due to high adapting capability with the diverse environments, bacteria are considered very intelligent among the family of microorganisms. The way bacteria communicates among themselves to regulate their survival strategies is the manifestation of their intelligence. Even, bacteria can talk!“
“They talk to each other with chemical signaling molecules or autoinducers and coordinate the complex biochemical processes, which is known as quorum sensing mechanism (see Fig. ?Fig.1).1). In human world, inter-human conversation is considered the most advantageous form of information transmission. Similarly, in bacterial community, the transmission of information is regulated via quorum sensing mechanism, which is not only limited in intraspecies communication but is extended to interspecies communication purpose also. Bacterium (e.g. E. coli, B. subtilis, V. fischeri, P. aeruginosa) release autoinducers from the cells and other bacterium in their vicinity are received this molecules. When autoinducers reach a threshold concentration, a coordinated change in bacterial behavior is initiated which stimulates cascade of signaling events resulting in the activation of quorum sensing genes. Bacteria make their own optimal survival strategy by this cell-to-cell communication mechanism (Shapiro 1998; Williams et al. 2007; Majumdar and Mondal 2016).”
Information transmission in microbial and fungal communication: from classical to quantum
Sarangam Majumdar and Sukla PalInformation
doi: 10.1007/s12079-018-0462-6