An overview of bacterial multicellular formations: biofilms, filaments, free-floating aggregates, motile collectives and fruiting bodies. For each form, we mention an analogous eukaryotic multicellular form (respectively animal epitelia, filaments in fungi, Volvox, Dictyostelium/social animals, Dictyostelium and other slime moulds)

How common is multicellularity in bacteria? And archaea?
And how does it evolve?

We wrote a short review "On the architecture and evolution of prokaryotic multicellularity".

Preprint link: bit.ly/4ta06Gq

Sharing and comments are much appreciated.
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📣 Delighted to announce Biological Control Systems 2026, held in-person in Oxford (14-15 Sept) 📣

This event brings together a broad community across synbio, control, and AI/ML. We welcome contributions from theory to experiments.

Abstracts + registration open: biocontrolseminars.org/biocontrol26

Our paper “A Self-Organized Tower of Babel: Diversification through Competition” is just out, that shows how local cooperation and global competition create clusters of diverse communities. journals.aps.org/prresearch/a...
Riz Noronha and Kunihiko Kaneko, Phys Rev. Res. (2025) 8, 013303

New group website: www.noramartin-lab.com
Get in touch if you are interested in joining the group, or know anyone who might be 📮

Curious about the origin of development during the transition to multicellularity?

A very belated preprint alert: bit.ly/4rr2mHU
Reproduction emerges from ecological interactions at the onset of multicellularity.

A short 🧵 with lots of videos...

From models to molecules: self-organized and instructed modes of developmental patterning www.nature.com/articles/s41... - nice piece by @davidbrueckner.bsky.social

Big news! At least for me. I'll start building my own research group at the amazing IMBA in Vienna. Starting from single-cell omics data, we will develop computational tools and theoretical models to understand how single cells make decisions, in particular during development. I think that IMBA is

Our review on Marr's levels in embryonic development is now out in @prxlife.bsky.social !

journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

We are currently continuing the exploration of this type B mechanism for our future work, as its novel way to differentiate has shown to provide high robustness to noise near tipping points under the right circumstances. For anyone interested in discussing, please feel free to reach out.

These different types align with the idea of Waddington's landscape as a decrease in potency, but differ in their properties, such as variance between cells, gene activity, attractor types, robustness to perturbations, and Lyapunov exponent

Type A uses chaos to grow small perturbations into distinct orbits. Type B sits on fixed points and differentiates through noise amplification, pushing a cell to both sides of a tipping point. Type C quenches and quickly falls into its final state through saddle nodes or SNIC bifurcations

In this work, we evolved GRNs with a slower timescale feedback mechanism and noise in the gene expression with the goal to differentiate to multiple cell types. In doing so, we discovered 3 distinct dynamics that can lead to cell differentiation from a dynamical systems perspective.

Happy to announce that the first work from my PhD research, supervised by Prof. Kunihiko Kaneko, has been published in @physrevresearch.bsky.social
journals.aps.org/prresearch/a...

#Differentiation #GRN #Evolution