Nicole King

Nicole King is a MacArthur Fellow (2005) and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley in molecular and cell biology and integrative biology.

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King studies the evolution of multicellularity, and her work on choanoflagellates significantly advances our understanding of how multicellular animals evolved from single-celled organisms.

Professional contributions

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-coding genes in animals at the base of the metazoan tree, such as sponges, cnidarians, and ctenophores.

More recent work by King demonstrates that molecules thought to underpin the transition to multicellarity actually existed in the single-celled choanoflagellates, long before the evolution of multicellular animals. For example, one of the most abundant and important cell adhesion molecules in the animal kindgom, cadherin, exists in choanoflagellates. In animals, cadherins are required to keep cells attached to their neighbors so it was a surprising to discover that cadherins predate the evolution of animals. In addition, King found the choanoflagellates possess genes that animal cells use to "talk" or signal to one another, such as Receptor tyrosine kinase. These findings represent a paradigm shift in the understanding about what events led to the origin of animals.

King continues her studies on choanoflagellates and multicellularity as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. King received her B.S. from Indiana University in 1992, in the lab of Thom Kaufman, working on the genetic workhorse, the fruitfly, also known as Drosophila melanogaster. She did her graduate work at Harvard (A.M., 1996, and Ph.D., 1999), studying spore formation in Bacillus subtilis. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, she accepted the position of assistant professor of genetics and development at the University of California, Berkeley.

King's lab has developed and maintained ChoanoBase, a genetic library about choanaflagellates.

King has been recognized as a leading thinker in evolutionary biology, both by the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award (2005) and the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences (2004).

References

• Gill, Aman Singh. "United We Stand: The Origins of Multicellular Animals," Berkeley Science Review #10 (2005).
• King, N. "The unicellular ancestry of animal development." Developmental Cell volume 7, pp. 313–325 (2004).
• King, N., Hittinger, C.T., and Carroll, S.B. "Evolution of key cell signaling and adhesion protein families predates the origin of animals." Science v. 301 (5631), pp. 361-363 (2003).
• Whitehouse, D. "Ancient ancestor's legacy of life." BBC News 2003 July 22.