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The egg or the chicken? An ancient unicellular says egg
! A cell division resembling that of an animal embryo has been observed in a prehistoric unicellular organism, suggesting that embryonic development might have existed prior to the evolution of animals. Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii.
This unicellular organism separated from the animal evolutionary line more than a billion years ago, offering valuable insight into the mechanisms that may have led to the transition to multicellularity. By observing C. perkinsii, the scientists discovered that these cells, once they have reached their maximum size, divide without growing any further, forming multicellular colonies resembling the early stages of animal embryonic development. Marine Olivetta, laboratory technician at the Department of Biochemistry in the UNIGE Faculty of Science and first author of the study, explains: “It’s fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years”.
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