A unicellular map is the embedding of a connected graph in a surface in such a way that the complement of the graph is simply connected. In a famous article, Harer and Zagier established a formula for the generating function of unicellular maps counted according to the number of vertices and edges. The keystone of their approach is a counting formula for unicellular maps on orientable surfaces ...

Microalgae covers an extremely diverse type of unicellular microorganisms that use light and efficiently fix CO2 through the process photosynthesis [...]

Life originated from unicellular organisms by circumventing the Second Law of Thermodynamics using the First Principles of Physiology, namely negentropy, chemiosmosis and homeostatic regulation of calcium and lipids. It is hypothesized that multicellular organisms are merely contrivances or tools, used by unicellular organisms as agents for the acquisition of epigenetic inheritance. The First P...

We consider maps on orientable surfaces. A map is unicellular if it has a single face. A covered map is a map with a marked unicellular spanning submap. For a map of genus g, the unicellular submap can have any genus in {0, 1, . . . , g}. Our main result is a bijection between covered maps with n edges and genus g and pairs made of a plane tree with n edges and a unicellular bipartite map of ge...

Multicellularity has evolved multiple times independently from a variety of ancestral unicellular lineages. Past research on multicellularity was focused more on explaining why it was repeatedly invented and less so on the molecular foundations associated with each transition. Several recent comparative functional analyses of microbial unicellular and multicellular genomes have begun to throw c...