A multicellular developmental program in a close animal relative

Abstract

All animals develop from a single-celled zygote into a complex multicellular organism through a series of precisely orchestrated processes. Despite the remarkable conservation of early embryogenesis across animals, the evolutionary origins of this process remain elusive. By combining time-resolved imaging and transcriptomic profiling, we show that single cells of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii - a close relative that diverged from animals approximately 1 billion years ago - undergo symmetry breaking and develop through cleavage divisions to produce a prolonged multicellular colony with distinct co-existing cell types. Our findings about the autonomous developmental program of C. perkinsii, hint that such animal-like multicellular development is either much older than previously thought or evolved convergently in ichthyosporeans.

Mosquito Tissue Ultrastructure-Expansion Microscopy (MoTissU-ExM) enables ultrastructural and anatomical analysis of malaria parasites and their mosquito

“…Since the initial development of ExM, many adaptations to and variations of ExM have been published. Notably, ultrastructure expansion microscopy (U-ExM) 4 has been widely applied to the study of single-celled organisms [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] . U-ExM involves the tethering of a biological sample to a hydrogel using formaldehyde and acrylamide, before denaturation, expansion and staining.…”