Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
J Theor Biol. 2018 Nov 14;457:170-179. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.08.038. Epub 2018 Aug 30.
The evolution of multicellularity was a major transition in the history of life on earth. Conditions under which multicellularity is favored have been studied theoretically and experimentally. But since the construction of a multicellular organism requires multiple rounds of cell division, a natural question is whether these cell divisions should be synchronous or not. We study a population model in which there compete simple multicellular organisms that grow by either synchronous or asynchronous cell divisions. We demonstrate that natural selection can act differently on synchronous and asynchronous cell division, and we offer intuition for why these phenotypes are generally not neutral variants of each other.
多细胞生物的进化是地球生命史上的一个重大转折点。人们从理论和实验两个方面研究了有利于多细胞生物形成的条件。但是，由于构建一个多细胞生物需要多次细胞分裂，一个自然的问题是这些细胞分裂应该是同步的还是不同步的。我们研究了一个种群模型，其中有简单的多细胞生物竞争，这些生物通过同步或异步细胞分裂来生长。我们证明了自然选择可以对同步和异步细胞分裂产生不同的作用，并提供了为什么这些表型通常不是彼此的中性变体的直觉。
