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A multicellular organism is an organism that consists of more than one cell, unlike unicellular organisms. [1] All species of animals , land plants and most fungi are multicellular, as are many algae , whereas a few organisms are partially uni- and partially multicellular, like slime molds and social amoebae such as the genus Dictyostelium .
The evolution of biological complexity is one important outcome of the process of evolution. [1] Evolution has produced some remarkably complex organisms – although the actual level of complexity is very hard to define or measure accurately in biology, with properties such as gene content, the number of cell types or morphology all proposed as possible metrics.
[15] [16] Complex multicellular organisms, not counting the aggregation of amoebae to form slime molds, have evolved within only six eukaryotic lineages: animals, symbiomycotan fungi, brown algae, red algae, green algae, and land plants. [17] Eukaryotes are grouped by genomic similarities, so that groups often lack visible shared ...
Unicellular organisms can move in order to find food or escape predators. Common mechanisms of motion include flagella and cilia. In multicellular organisms, cells can move during processes such as wound healing, the immune response and cancer metastasis. For example, in wound healing in animals, white blood cells move to the wound site to kill ...
Alternation of generations is defined as the alternation of multicellular diploid and haploid forms in the organism's life cycle, regardless of whether these forms are free-living. [6] In some species, such as the alga Ulva lactuca , the diploid and haploid forms are indeed both free-living independent organisms, essentially identical in ...
Differentiation happens multiple times during the development of a multicellular organism as it changes from a simple zygote to a complex system of tissues and cell types. Differentiation continues in adulthood as adult stem cells divide and create fully differentiated daughter cells during tissue repair and during normal cell turnover.
Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia (/ ˌ æ n ɪ ˈ m eɪ l i ə / [4]).With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have myocytes and are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development.
Before early Cambrian diversification, [b] most organisms were relatively simple, composed of individual cells or small multicellular organisms, occasionally organized into colonies. As the rate of diversification subsequently accelerated, the variety of life became much more complex and began to resemble that of today. [ 12 ]