Patterns of origination and evolution of early complex life on this planet are largely interpreted from the fossils of the Precambrian soft-bodied Ediacara Biota. These fossils occur globally and represent a diverse suite of organisms living in marine environments. Although these exceptionally preserved fossil assemblages are typically difficult to reconcile with modern phyla, examination of th...

Initial hypothesis According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional differentiation, or the union of symbionts, in which there already was a certain simple functional separation. However, in either case the progenitors o...

SYNOPSIS. The maximum degree of hierarchical structure of organisms has risen over the history of life, notably in three transitions: the origin of the eukaryotic cell from symbiotic associations of prokaryotes; the emergence of the first multicellular individuals from clones of eukaryotic cells; and the origin of the first individuated colonies from associations of multicellular organisms. The...

Initial hypothesis According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional differentiation, or the union of symbionts, in which there already was a certain simple functional separation. However, in either case the progenitors o...

Synthetic biology provides an opportunity for the construction and exploration of alternative solutions to biological problems - solutions different from those chosen by natural life. To this end, synthetic biologists have built new sensory systems, cellular memories, and alternative genetic codes. There is a growing interest in applying synthetic approaches to multicellular systems, especially...

Introduction: Imaging of multicellular organisms with nano-scale resolution is one of the challenges of modern life sciences. To solve biological problems, often the combined information of several microscopy techniques is necessary. While confocal fluorescence microscopy and optical super-resolution fluorescence can detect the distribution of markers in live cells, electron microscopy (EM) off...

While early eukaryotic life must have been unicellular, multicellular lifeforms evolved multiple times from protistan ancestors in diverse eukaryotic lineages. The origins of multicellularity are of special interest because they require evolutionary transitions towards increased levels of complexity. We have generated new sequence data from the nuclear large subunit ribosomal DNA gene (LSU rDNA...

The notion of ' self' is intrinsically linked to the concepts of identity and individuality. During evolutionary transitions in individuality-such as, for instance, during the origin of the first cell, the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of multicellular individuals-new kinds of individuals emerged from the interaction of previously independent entities. The question discussed here...

background: radiotherapy is an established therapeutic modality for prostate cancer. resveratrol, a natural antioxidant, has been shown to inhibit carcinogenesis and to block the process of tumor initiation and progression. no data is available on the response of cellular spheroid to reseveratol. in this study we have examined the effect of resveratol on the radiation response of human prostate...

background: rad51 is a protein with critical role in double strand break repair. down-regulation of this protein has a significant effect in radiosensitivity of some cell lines like prostate carcinoma. compared to monolayer cell culture model, the spheroids are more resistant to radiation. the aim of the current study was to determine the rad51 protein level in du145 spheroids, and monolayer ce...