Comb jellies are helping answer fundamental questions in biology, from how the earliest nervous systems evolved to how bioluminescence works.

Aggregative multicellularity was key to the evolution of the multicellular animal genetic toolkit.

Animals must obtain half of their amino acids from the diet, influencing their evolution and metabolism. This study suggests that energy pressures favored this outsourcing, enabling proteins to evolve...

Abstract. Sponges (phylum Porifera) are known to form symbiotic relationships with a variety of organisms, including other sponges. Recently, such symbiosi

Learned societies play a vital role in fostering interactions that are important in scholarly discourse and the advancement of biological sciences. However, they now face threats from declining fundin...

A model for the evolution of multicellularity in a spatially heterogeneous environment shows that indirect mechanisms such as escape from competition and increased environmental exploitation can drive...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

How animals evolved from their unicellular ancestor is a fundamental biological question. The fact that all animals are monophyletic—sharing a single common ancestor—implies their origin from unicellu...