Fungus Grows 20,000 Times Larger in Record Time.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been studying a brewer's yeast that mutated to remain attached in clusters as 'snowflake' yeast. After thousands of generations of careful selection, the organism has grown to over half a million clonal cells, 20,000 times larger than its ancestor. The study is called the Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE), and researchers are hoping to run it for decades. The first major findings have come after 3,000 generations of evolution. The evolution of snowflake yeast in the lab supports the idea that oxygen was a significant constraint on the first multicellular life forms on Earth.