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Evolution of irreversible somatic differentiation

View ORCID ProfileYuanxiao Gao, View ORCID ProfileHye Jin Park, View ORCID ProfileArne Traulsen, View ORCID ProfileYuriy Pichugin
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.18.427219
Yuanxiao Gao
1Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Str. 2, 24306 Plön, Germany
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Hye Jin Park
1Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Str. 2, 24306 Plön, Germany
2Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, Pohang, 37673, Korea
3Department of Physics, POSTECH, Pohang, 37673, Korea
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Arne Traulsen
1Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Str. 2, 24306 Plön, Germany
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Yuriy Pichugin
1Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Str. 2, 24306 Plön, Germany
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  • For correspondence: pichugin@evolbio.mpg.de
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Abstract

A key innovation emerging in complex animals is irreversible somatic differentiation: daughters of a vegetative cell perform a vegetative function as well, thus, forming a somatic lineage that can no longer be directly involved in reproduction. Primitive species use a different strategy: vegetative and reproductive tasks are separated in time rather than in space. Starting from such a strategy, how is it possible to evolve life forms which use some of their cells exclusively for vegetative functions? Here, we developed an evolutionary model of development of a simple multicellular organism and found that three components are necessary for the evolution of irreversible somatic differentiation: (i) costly cell differentiation, (ii) vegetative cells that significantly improve the organism’s performance even if present in small numbers, and (iii) large enough organism size. Our findings demonstrate how an egalitarian development typical for loose cell colonies can evolve into germ-soma differentiation dominating metazoans.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted January 19, 2021.
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Evolution of irreversible somatic differentiation
Yuanxiao Gao, Hye Jin Park, Arne Traulsen, Yuriy Pichugin
bioRxiv 2021.01.18.427219; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.18.427219
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Evolution of irreversible somatic differentiation
Yuanxiao Gao, Hye Jin Park, Arne Traulsen, Yuriy Pichugin
bioRxiv 2021.01.18.427219; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.18.427219

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