A new study, supported in part by the NASA Astrobiology Program, has brought into question the ‘Oxygen Control Hypothesis.’ Scientists have long hypothesized that the rise of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere was linked to the evolution of large, multicellular organisms. The new study used directed evolution, synthetic biology, and mathematical modeling to show that this is not necessarily the case.

The study, “Oxygen suppression of macroscopic multicellularity,” was published in the journal Nature.

Click here to read a press release from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) regarding this work.