International team of scientists headed by the evolutionary geneticist Professor Tomislav Domazet-Lošo, PhD from the Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB) and Catholic University of Croatia (HKS) discovered that bacterial biofilms behave like embrios. This research sheds completely new light on previous knowledge regarding Earth’s first life forms. The results of this research were published in the influential scientific journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

The research was conducted by an international team of scientists gathering researchers from the Laboratory for Evolutionary Genetics at IRB, three faculties of the University of Zagreb (Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry and Faculty of Science) and scientists from Chalmers University in Gothenburg and Technical University of Denmark. 

The results of this research call into question the special multicellular status of eukaryotic organisms and show that bacteria are more complex than originally believed.

The research was conducted with a grant from the Croatian Science Foundation awarded to the project IP-2016-06-5924 Phylostratigraphy of gene gain and loss, whose Principal Investigator is Professor Domazet-Lošo, and grants from the City of Zagreb, Adris Foundation and DATACROSS Project.

More information about the research results can be found at the IRB website, while the original article is available here.