Oxygen suppression of macroscopic multicellularity.

ABSTRACT: Atmospheric oxygen is thought to have played a vital role in the evolution of large, complex multicellular organisms. Challenging the prevailing theory, we show that the transition from an anaerobic to an aerobic world can strongly suppress the evolution of macroscopic multicellularity. Here we select for increased size in multicellular 'snowflake' yeast across a range of metabolically-available O₂ levels. While yeast under anaerobic and high-O₂ conditions evolved to be considerably larger, intermediate O₂ constrained the evolution of large size. Through sequencing and synthetic strain construction, we confirm that this is due to O₂-mediated divergent selection acting on organism size. We show via mathematical modeling that our results stem from

SUBMITTER: Bozdag GO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8121917 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature