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Metabolism and Multicellularity Revisited

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Energy and Evolutionary Conflict

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Abstract

Theories relating multicellularity to metabolism date back at least to Charles Manning Child. Redox gradients and signaling no doubt play an integral role in multicellular organisms, adapting organismal features to the constraints of metabolism. Metabolism may also figure prominently in conflict mediation. Emerging data from various sources suggest the intriguing possibility that multicellularity involves a shift from continually proliferative Warburg-like unicellular organisms to multicellular ones with cell division downregulated in a nutrient-scarce, chemiosmotic somatic environment. Signaling pathways whose forerunners may have formed during the origin of eukaryotes may tie metabolism to proliferation. In this context, nutrient scarcity may function as a mechanism of conflict mediation, constraining the replication rate of lower-level units and thus the rate of copying errors leading to defecting cells. Much of this decrease may reflect simple consequences of bioenergetics—when nutrients are scarce, replication rates of individual cells are necessarily diminished, decreasing both the costs borne by cooperators and the benefits reaped by defectors. Taxa such as slime molds, yeasts, and corals illustrate the relationship between nutrient scarcity and cooperation. While studies of mammalian cancers have focused on “druggable targets,” recently a notable shift has occurred in the literature so that metabolic pathways are becoming more-and-more of a central consideration.

One possible intrinsic difficulty (maybe the biggest hurdle?) is the appropriate down-regulation of cell division at the appropriate time and space in the organism.

Eörs Szathmáry and Lewis Wolpert [1]

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  1. Dept of Biological Sciences, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL, USA

    Neil W. Blackstone

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Blackstone, N.W. (2022). Metabolism and Multicellularity Revisited. In: Energy and Evolutionary Conflict. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06059-5_10

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