Nicole King is a MacArthur Fellow (2005) and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley in molecular and cell biology and integrative biology.
King studies the evolution of multicellularity, and her work on choanoflagellates has significantly advanced our understanding of how multicellular animals evolved from single-celled organisms.
King has been a pioneer in identifying choanoflagellates as key organisms to answer questions about...
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Nicole King is a MacArthur Fellow (2005) and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley in molecular and cell biology and integrative biology.
King studies the evolution of multicellularity, and her work on choanoflagellates has significantly advanced our understanding of how multicellular animals evolved from single-celled organisms.
King has been a pioneer in identifying choanoflagellates as key organisms to answer questions about the origin of multicellularity. Prior to her work, it was unclear whether choanoflagellates or fungi were the closest outgroup to multicellular animals (also called "metazoans"). King's comparative genomics work in collaboration with Sean Carroll has also significantly advanced the understanding of the evolutionary "tree of life," and charts the evolutionary relationship of all organisms to each other. Additionally, work by King and colleagues shows that choanoflagellates possess several protein-coding genes that are highly related to protein...
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