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Phenotypic plasticity, life cycles, and the evolutionary transition to multicellularity

Si Tang, View ORCID ProfileYuriy Pichugin, View ORCID ProfileKatrin Hammerschmidt
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.29.462355
Si Tang
1Institute of General Microbiology, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany
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Yuriy Pichugin
2Department of Evolutionary Theory, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany
3Departament of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA
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  • For correspondence: katrinhammerschmidt@googlemail.com pichugin@princeton.edu
Katrin Hammerschmidt
1Institute of General Microbiology, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany
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  • ORCID record for Katrin Hammerschmidt
  • For correspondence: katrinhammerschmidt@googlemail.com pichugin@princeton.edu
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SUMMARY

Understanding the evolutionary transition to multicellularity is a key problem in evolutionary biology (1,2). While around 25 independent instances of the evolution of multicellular existence are known across the tree of life (3), the ecological conditions that drive such transformations are not well understood. The first known transition to multicellularity occurred approximately 2.5 billion years ago in cyanobacteria (4–6), and today’s cyanobacteria are characterized by an enormous morphological diversity, ranging from single-celled species over simple filamentous to highly differentiated filamentous ones (7,8). While the cyanobacterium Cyanothece sp. ATCC 51142 was isolated from the intertidal zone of the U.S. Gulf Coast as a unicellular species (9), we are first to additionally report a phenotypically mixed strategy where multicellular filaments and unicellular stages alternate. We experimentally demonstrate that the facultative multicellular life cycle depends on environmental conditions, such as salinity and population density, and use a theoretical model to explore the process of filament dissolution. While results predict that the observed response can be caused by an excreted compound in the medium, we cannot fully exclude changes in nutrient availability (as in (10,11)). The best fit modeling results demonstrate a nonlinear effect of the compound, which is characteristic for density-dependent sensing systems (12,13). Further, filament fragmentation is predicted to occur by means of connection cleavage rather than by cell death of every alternate cell. The phenotypic switch between the single-celled and multicellular morphology constitutes an environmentally dependent life cycle, which likely represents an important step en route to permanent multicellularity.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • https://github.com/yuriypichugin/cyanobacteria-filament-fragmentation

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 October 01, 2021.
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Phenotypic plasticity, life cycles, and the evolutionary transition to multicellularity
Si Tang, Yuriy Pichugin, Katrin Hammerschmidt
bioRxiv 2021.09.29.462355; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.29.462355
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Phenotypic plasticity, life cycles, and the evolutionary transition to multicellularity
Si Tang, Yuriy Pichugin, Katrin Hammerschmidt
bioRxiv 2021.09.29.462355; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.29.462355

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