Abstract

A major evolutionary event in the history of life was the transition from unicellular organisms to multicellular ones. In particular, how multicellular animals evolved remains unknown and its understanding is crucial to understand the origin and formation of obligate multicellularity, embryogenesis, 3D tissues, and even cancer. The only way to address this question is to investigate the closest unicellular relatives of animals, which, interestingly share many genes with animals and are capable to have temporal multicellular life stages. I will show those organisms and what are they telling us about animal origins.