"The unicellular ancestry of animals"
Nicole King, Ph.D.
Department of Molecular & Cell Biology
Department of Integrative Biology
University of California, Berkeley
The transition to multicellularity that launched the evolution of animals from protozoa marks one of the most pivotal, and poorly understood, events in life’s history. Advances in phylogenetics and comparative genomics, and particularly the study of choanoflagellates, are yielding new insights into the biology of the unicellular progenitors of animals. Signaling and adhesion gene families critical for animal development (including receptor tyrosine kinases and cadherins) evolved in protozoa before the origin of animals. Investigations of protozoan genomes may reveal how innovations in transcriptional regulation and expansions of certain gene families contributed to the integration of cell behavior during the earliest experiments with multicellularity. The protozoan perspective on animal origins promises to provide a valuable window into the distant past, and into the cellular bases of animal development.
Nicole studies choanoflagellates and the origin of animal multicellularity. Her interest in biology began with childhood fossil hunting expeditions and a middle school project studying axolotl nutritional requirements. She received a B.S. in Biology from Indiana University, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Harvard University, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nicole is a new assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley with a joint appointment in the Departments of Molecular and Cell Biology and Integrative Biology.