Expert: Dana Krempels - 10/22/2009

Question
Hello,

Lately I've been reading up on Richard Lenski's experiment on E. coli and found it fascinating on how one colony eventually gained the ability to utilize citrate as a food source. I was wondering if you knew about any similar experiments (ongoing or finished) dealing with evolution of uni-cellular to multi-cellular organisms. I suspect that since this is magnitudes more complex then utilizing citrate that such an experiment would take 500 years if we were lucky :-p But I would be pleasantly surprised if this was not the case and would also appreciate any good findings on this topic other then what appears in wikipedia.

Answer
Dear Jason,

I am not aware of any such studies, which--as you have already guessed--would be nearly impossible to design, and might take an impossibly long time to see results.

What we know about the evolution of multicellularity is pretty much from observing the increasing complexity of closely related organisms, such as in the volvocine line of evolution in green algae.  These species can't be said to have evolved from each other.  But they do show that a single ancestor can give rise to multiple forms, some of them having found an advantage in multicellularity.  You can see more here:

http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:yqEv891I_jAJ:evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/...

Hope that at least provides some food for thought.

Have fun!

Dana