And how about you, Vaughn?

So I had the just good fortune to see changes in bacterial populations when they were growing on surfaces when I was a postdoc.

And it looked like.

These cells were forming these biofilms that may be working differently together than by themselves as clones like I had been studying as a graduate student and before.

And so it sort of carried that forward as I started my independent career.

And it got me thinking a lot more carefully about multicellularity, life on surfaces, How that worked, how is that maybe a model of life's origins? How does it work today? To what extent are bacteria actually used typically multicellular versus solitary? Probably more the latter than the former.

So even though those are not evolutionary units, the transitions between being alone and together are quite fluid.

Can you explain why this was so important and unprecedented in some ways to bring that full scope of scientific knowledge into this project?