Single-celled archaea microbes pack their DNA into flexible coils that expand and stretch much like a Slinky does. This kind of molecular gymnastics had never been seen before in other organisms and ...

The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

Maddy has a degree in biochemistry from the University of York and specializes in reporting on health, medicine, and genetics. Maddy has a degree in biochemistry from the University of York and ...

An elusive marine microbe, once known only by its DNA, has finally been cultured in the lab and could grant hints as to how eukaryotic life originated, researchers reported August 8 in a preprint ...

Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) revealed key details about the evolution of life on Earth by studying microorganisms known as Asgard archaea. The study ...

Led by Jizhong Zhou, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma, an international research team conducted a long term experiment that found that ...

Earth’s immense web of life fill three broad domains—archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. Scientists from Monash University recently discovered hydrogen-producing enzymes in archaea, which were thought to ...

A newly discovered phylum of Archaea, Brockarchaeota, can break down plant and organic matter without releasing methane. An international collaboration between scientists based in the USA and China, ...

Every summer from 2013 to 2015, Dimitry Sorokin waded into the shallow, briny, alkaline lakes of Siberia’s Kulunda Steppe. Pale carbonate minerals crusted the pools’ edges, where lambs, too young to ...

A family tree showing representatives of the major groups (phyla) of microbes in different colors. Names in red are the first 56 genomes sequenced for the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea.