Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

Can life exist without the very metabolic machinery that defines it? The discovery of Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile ...

Sperm and egg cells, or gametes, are unusual. Egg cells are some of the largest cell types, and sperm are some of the smallest. In humans, these haploid cells come together to form diploid cells. It's ...

Scientists have been trying to learn more about archaea since these microbes were discovered in the 1970s. Their DNA is not contained in a nucleus, so they are a type of prokaryote, and were initially ...

A newly discovered promoter element "start" points to a shared regulatory syntax for controlling transcription initiation in ...

The archaea constitute a separate domain of life, distinct from bacteria, with many aspects of their biology closer to eukaryotes. Archaea have been adopted as a model system for studies on eukaryotes ...

The biodiversity of the Earth never ceases to astonish. One example that has radically changed the face of biology is the discovery of a group of organisms called archaea (pronounced “ar-kee-ah”). It ...