Plasticity and scaling through multinucleation: a key adaptation to challenging environments

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Multinucleate cells, single cells containing multiple nuclei in a shared cytoplasm, are found across the eukaryotic tree of life. Having evolved independently in fungi, plants, protists, and animals, they thrive in environments ranging from nutrient-poor deep-sea sediments to dynamic soil microhabitats and host tissues. Multinucleate organization enables spatial specialization without internal partitions and rapid scaling of metabolic or transcriptional capacity, allowing organisms to forage across patchy resources, withstand physical stress, and respond quickly to environmental fluctuations. Yet multinucleation also brings challenges, including diffusion limits, nuclear coordination, and the potential for genetic conflict. Its repeated emergence, often in lineages that have also evolved multicellularity, points to shared cellular, structural, and regulatory prerequisites shaped by ecological pressures. Here, we integrate perspectives from cell biology, ecology, and evolution to demonstrate that multinucleation is not a rare anomaly but a fundamental organizational strategy. Recognizing these systems as adaptive responses to environmental constraints provides a framework for uncovering general principles of cellular organization, evolution of life cycle strategies, and the diversification of complex life. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2MH1R Cell and Developmental Biology, Cell Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences multinucleation, cell scaling, ecological adaptation, evolution of cell architecture, multicellularity, syncytia, coenocytes, Cell Biology Published: 2025-11-26 07:35 Last Updated: 2025-11-26 07:35 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Language: English