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Preprint Highlight: Evolution of selfish multicellularity collective organisation of individual spatio-temporal regulatory strategies.

In origins-of-life studies, how interactions between unicellular individuals give rise to multicellular organisms is an open question. Presumably, the evolution of cell adhesion enables responses to emergent selection pressures, driving cell collective formation, and migration. This study implements a multiscale computational model of unicellular individuals possessing regulatory gene networks and evolvable adhesion proteins, or not, within changing environments. In an initial environment that is resource limited, cells with evolvable adhesions divide first and migrate as a cluster later, exploiting cooperativity to move toward resource-abundant locations as a collective while maximizing lineage propagation. This link between the evolution of resource competition dynamics and cellular adhesion interactions provides insight into how unicellular ancestors might have made the progression to multicellular collectives.