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New Zealand scientists involved in a discovery that has unlocked one of the secrets of evolution have claimed the findings could help understand the origins of cancer and other biological problems.
The scientists, with counterparts from Germany and the United States, have reported the real-time evolution of single-cell organisms into organisms that have the hallmarks of multicellular life forms.
Beginning with single cells, the researchers showed how simple cooperating groups of bacteria could reproduce via a life cycle that incorporated "cheating" cells as a primitive germ line, said lead researcher Massey University Professor Paul Rainey, of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study (NZIAS).
Cheats were cells that did not contribute to the integrity of the group, but took advantage of the benefits of being part of a collective, and could cause the group to collapse in an over abundance.
"Cheats are typically viewed as the greatest impediment to the emergence of multicellular life because they collapse cooperating groups -- the obvious thing to do is to get rid of them," Rainey said in a statement Thursday.
The five-year project saw scientists test the idea that cheats could play a constructive role in evolution by allowing simple microbial group to evolve by either embracing or purging the cheats.
"When cheats were embraced we discovered something surprising," NZIAS researcher Caroline Rose said in the statement.
"Evolution saw a new kind of entity a group comprised of two different cell states: cheating and cooperating cells. Evolution couldn't focus on just one state or the other; for lineages to persist, evolution had to see both types it had to work on a developmental program," said Rose.
"The emergence of these primordial life cycles holds the key to understanding some of biology's most profound problems: the origins of multicellularity; the origins of soma/germ differentiation, of reproduction, of development -- even the origins of cancer," said Rainey.
