In multicellular organisms different patterns have been reported.
However, amazing adaptations to extreme stresses do not only occur in microbes, but also in many multicellular organisms.
Movement was present in the cells that gave rise to multicellular organisms some 3,000 million years ago.
Molecular permeability is difficult to assess even qualitatively in multicellular systems (such as pieces of tissue or sheets of cultured cells).
The adaptive pathway that led from choanoflagellates to the multicellular sponges may have involved the organization of different cell types.
As some of the multicellular extremophiles discussed here clearly underline, this does not necessarily have to be the case.
In other words, the biological diversity of the microbes is much greater than that of large multicellular organisms.
The mechanism responsible for the destruction of the secretory epithelium is apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death that occurs in all multicellular animals.