The development of multicellularity has been a remarkable turning point in Earth’s biological history, enabling greater morphological diversity and the formation of new organizational structures. This transformation hinged on three key process: cells staying connected to form groups, cells within these groups differentiating to perform specialized tasks, and these groups adopting regulated reproductive strategies.
Although recent research has uncovered the selective pressures and genetic mutations responsible for the emergence of basic multicellularity and cell differentiation, the evolution of life cycles—specifically, the reproduction methods of simple multicellular organisms—has not been as extensively explored. We therefore wanted to explore the conditions that could drive basic clusters to reproduce in a controlled manner, alternating between multicellular growth and dissolving into single cells to colonize new environments.
