Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:00
a long time ago approximately 40.4.3 billion years ago singular cellular life established itself on the planet and it thrived on Earth for billions of years but at some point
00:00:12
something else happened in the history of the planet when some of this life decided to combine into something larger single cells started to form larger and larger structures eventually developing
00:00:25
into multicellular life with some of these structures becoming permanent some of these structures acquiring different functions and eventually evolving into some of the first primitive animal life
00:00:36
on the planet life that contained billions and even trillions of cells differentiating and creating specific organs and eventually evolving more and more complexity or in essence sometimes in the past we had this very unusual
00:00:50
transition from basically successful single cells into more complex multi cells and this was of course the creation of the first multicellular life or so the theory goes we obviously have
00:01:03
no actual proof or evidence for any of this mostly because none of this would survive billions of years of being stuck inside the fossil but because our planet still has single cells and because we have more to Cellular life like
00:01:15
ourselves coexisting those single cells it's the only explanation that currently makes sense but how exactly did this change from micro to macro happen how did one cell become many and what led to
00:01:27
the formation of this unusual structure that I guess to some extent would not really make sense at first single cells are usually very successful by themselves now it's a difficult question to answer and especially a more
00:01:40
difficult question to answer when it comes to the timeline but it's a question we can try to answer by conducting experiments in present time and it looks like this recent experiment might have provided some extremely
00:01:52
essential answers for how this might have happened a whole wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing one of the potential answers for this a new raw phenomenon of single cells becoming multi cells or a
00:02:04
crucial step in the evolution of complex life on a planet that up until recently was somewhat difficult to answer a recent experiment was actually physically able to recreate a formation of multicellular life not a really
00:02:17
complex one but actually somewhat large in size and even visible to a naked eye and somewhat related to the Fermi Paradox videos on a channel to some extent the social release or provides an answer to the idea known as the great
00:02:31
filter or the great filter hypothesis we know that for some reason life on the planet went through this extreme change where a lot of single cells on planet earth preferentially started to evolve into multi cells eventually leading to
00:02:43
organisms like us and it's actually super important to figure out why this happened in order to figure out if it could happen on another planet an alien planet out there would have to have very similar conditions to play on Earth or
00:02:56
at least similar limitations in order for more to sell their alive to occur and so what exactly did the scientists recently discover well as always you can find the links for all of this in the description below but in a nutshell with this particular study focused on
00:03:09
studying something that's already been studied for quite a long time in a lot of different similar conditions here we're talking about this this is common East the stuff that we use in baking and
00:03:21
the Single Cell microorganisms that are technically eukaryotic which makes them more complex than bacteria but in essence are also members of the fungus Kingdom basically Mushroom Kingdom and unlike bacteria they were only developed
00:03:34
a few hundred million years ago so these are recent arrivals to planet Earth compared to more ancient life now one thing that makes yeast somewhat interesting is that it does have a tendency to collaborate or cooperate
00:03:46
with bacteria as well here's an example from the drink known as kombucha and in some cases it forms relatively complex colonies as well and it's obviously also relatively easy to grow and Humanity has
00:03:58
been growing yeast for 1000 thousands of years since some of the early bread and of course some of the earlier beer and so because it's so easy to grow for the past few years some scientists in certain Labs wanted to see if they can
00:04:10
actually evolve yeast a little bit faster and so in some of the earlier experiments they grew Eastern tubes and watched some of the cells combine into larger chunks and sink to the bottom and so as far back as 2012 they actually
00:04:23
were able to selectively breed certain yeast cells to create larger and larger structures much faster or just to rephrase this the selectively bread yeast to form small multicellular structures with a lot more efficiency
00:04:37
and much faster than regular yeast by selectively breeding it over several different generations of collecting yeast chunks from the bottom of these tubes this was basic darwinian selection at work and this didn't really take long
00:04:50
to produce larger chunks as a matter of fact according to the scientists behind the study this only took approximately 60 days and so after 60 days of breeding most of the yeast would prefer to form larger structures compared to single
00:05:02
structures but this of course had no actual reason for happening and normally occurred randomly because instead of drifting apart some cells would stick together creating a larger and larger structures either way after just two
00:05:15
months they went from predominantly single cell to multicellular yeast that looked a little bit muddier and a little bit chunkier inside a typical tube and obviously this was kind of interesting and so many intriguing at first it
00:05:27
didn't necessarily show us how much is a real life evolved afterwards especially because at this point they basically got stuck this was as big as these cells would get no matter what the scientists did they would not get bigger than a few
00:05:41
micrometers and more importantly they didn't actually have a very strong connection and would be very easy to break and so not only were they kind of fragile they sort of refused to grow past a few hundred cells and so in that
00:05:54
sense this was not really a proof of anything it didn't show us how multicellular life could have evolved and just showed us that some cells can basically just stick together but that's of course until the more recent study
00:06:05
from 2023 the scientists did something else and it really transformed everything with this image alone enough to show us the transformation it went from just a few hundred cells to really
00:06:17
large chunks visible with naked eye some chunks being 20 000 times bigger than anything from 10 years ago and containing up to half a million cells in many cases with specific function and
00:06:30
more importantly three-dimensional structure that seemed to be more or less permanent and would not break very easily and so what exactly happened here and what did the scientists change in order to demonstrate all of this well
00:06:41
intriguingly they didn't actually add anything they took something Away by taking these smaller chunks and depriving them of oxygen they suddenly created conditions where it was beneficial for yeast to not be alone and
00:06:55
to be in larger structures and keeping yeast in oxygen deprived conditions for several months they realized that all of these structures would grow larger and larger because it seemed to be beneficial for their survival within 600
00:07:08
days they would be visible to naked eye here this is a few millimeters across more importantly a lot of cells in this case became much longer strengthened the connection between themselves and started to develop individual structures
00:07:21
that would provide additional resilience making these structures stronger than the wood to some extent even resembling simple bodies but more importantly the cells within the structure now started
00:07:33
to acquire different roles some cells grew really fast some cells provided very rigid very tough structure yet other cells for some reason would self-destruct in other words this was a definitive sign of multicellular
00:07:47
formation same cells perform in different roles in a much larger organism although this type of emerging behavior is actually quite common in nature you can actually find another video on the famous slime mode in this
00:07:59
description below where this unusual single cell organism starts to acquire a lot of complex emerging properties as it becomes larger and larger in size to some extent even mimicking simple intelligence and so seeing these
00:08:13
emerging properties coming from common yeast is Not Unusual either as a matter of fact we believe that this is sort of a common feature for a lot of complex structures as something becomes larger and more complex a lot of unexpected
00:08:26
emerging properties usually start to arise as well what sort of properties is anyone's gas although I guess the more interesting question here is why exactly did some cells start to self-destruct well here the scientists believe that
00:08:38
maybe this is one of the ways they can create reproductive clusters by releasing small fragments into the environment around themselves they basically provide more nutrients possibly allowing other structures to
00:08:50
grow larger and larger as well although at the moment it's kind of difficult to determine and intriguingly after just two years these structures also evolved an emerging problem property that allowed them to bring nutrients to the
00:09:02
cell inside the structure while at the same time getting rid of various types of waste basically it managed to evolve a really rudimentary circulatory system with all this basically happening as a result of that external pressure lack of
00:09:16
oxygen and selective breeding recreate it entirely in a scientific lab and are usually scientists assume that oxygen should be good for multicellular life it's really the absence of oxygen that
00:09:28
seems to cause life to come into larger structures and to form larger bodies in an oxygen-rich environment it's probably a lot more beneficial to stay as a single cell and obviously it doesn't show us how something extremely complex
00:09:41
can form it definitely demonstrates the formation of much more simple multicellular life which in time could evolve complexity as well and because we know that multi-cellular life on the planet evolved at least 25 times in the
00:09:54
past these new experiments and these new observations show us that maybe this is something that's very common across the entire universe assuming that single cells exist there as well and when it comes to Fermi Paradox and the great
00:10:07
filter presenting some evidence that maybe this is not one of the filters after all maybe this is just something really common and could happen anywhere because it definitely happened in this lab in just over two years and that's
00:10:21
absolutely incredible it's actually a super intriguing Discovery when it comes to the evolution of life on the planet I am sort of looking forward to seeing more from this particular lab which by the way you can learn more about in one of the links in the description below
00:10:33
and so on that note until we find out something else or until some other experiments that's pretty much it check out relevant links and the formula Paradox playlist in the description below subscribe maybe share this with someone who has learned about space and
00:10:46
Sciences come back tomorrow to learn Latinos and maybe support this year on patreon by Julian Jenner membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music]
00:11:17
thank you thank you
End of transcript