How genes form bodies.
This is hot shit, a possible worst case but sure to get there scenario to understand the brain!
Some good mentions at: Video "Where is Anatomy Encoded in Living Systems? by Michael Levin (2022)".
It is quite mind blowing when you think about it, that the huge majority of your body's cells is essentially just there to support a tiny ammount of germline, which are the only cells that can actually pass on! It is fun to imagine the cell type tree for this, with a huge branching of somatic cells, and only a few germline going forward.
One of the simplest known seems to be: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax
www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/articles/a_00220.html "The simplest multicellular organism unveiled" from 2013 mentions Tetrabaena socialis.
Then of course: Caenorhabditis elegans is a relatively simple and widely studied model organism.
It is hard to distinguish between colonies of unicellular organism and multicellular organism as there is a continuum between both depending on how well integrated they cells are.
From Wikipedia:and:
Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 25 times in eukaryotes
Complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups: animals, symbiomycotan fungi, brown algae, red algae, green algae, and land plants.
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