{"doi":"10.7554/elife.72707","title":"Cellular organization in lab-evolved and extant multicellular species obeys a maximum entropy law","abstract":"The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains unknown about how cell packing geometries arise, and how they are affected by random noise during growth - especially absent developmental programs. Here, we quantify the statistics of cellular neighborhoods of two different multicellular eukaryotes: lab-evolved ‘snowflake’ yeast and the green alga Volvox carteri . We find that despite large differences in cellular organization, the free space associated with individual cells in both organisms closely fits a modified gamma distribution, consistent with maximum entropy predictions originally developed for granular materials. This ‘entropic’ cellular packing ensures a degree of predictability despite noise, facilitating parent-offspring fidelity even in the absence of developmental regulation. Together with simulations of diverse growth morphologies, these results suggest that gamma-distributed cell neighborhood sizes are a general feature of multicellularity, arising from conserved statistics of cellular packing.","journal":"eLife","year":2022,"id":240857,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":43,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9519,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":534838,"name":"Stephanie S. M. H. Höhn","orcid":"0000-0003-1815-705X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":869455,"name":"Seyed A Zamani-Dahaj","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":346661,"name":"David Yanni","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":806781,"name":"Anthony Burnetti","orcid":"0000-0003-3856-8251","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":869456,"name":"Jennifer Pentz","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":869457,"name":"Aurelia R Honerkamp-Smith","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":753824,"name":"Hugo Wioland","orcid":"0000-0001-5254-9642","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":869458,"name":"Hannah R Sleath","orcid":null,"position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":869459,"name":"William C Ratcliff","orcid":null,"position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":821262,"name":"Raymond E. Goldstein","orcid":"0000-0003-2645-0598","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":345630,"name":"Peter J. Yunker","orcid":"0000-0001-8471-4171","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":806782,"name":"Thomas C. Day","orcid":"0000-0003-4681-9348","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":82,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:22:51.435773Z","pmid":"35188101","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}