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 ...

Ten years ago, nobody knew that Asgard archaea even existed. In 2015, however, researchers examining deep-sea sediments discovered gene fragments that indicated a new and previously undiscovered form ...

The archaea constitute a distinct domain of life yet several important aspects of their biochemical processes are closely related to those in eukaryotes. Archaea have therefore been used as a model ...

Hypersaline environments, such as solar salterns, soda lakes, deep-sea brines, salt mines, salted foods, and dry soils, are among the most challenging ...

An artist’s depiction of an Asgard archaeon, based on cryo-electron tomography data: the cell body and appendages feature thread-like skeletal structures, similar to those found in complex cells with ...

A first look into the molecular defenses of archaea highlights the importance of surveying diverse microbes to discover new types of antimicrobials As bacteria become increasingly resistant to ...

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 study led by researchers at Indiana University is the first to find similarities between the organization of chromosomes in humans and archaea. The discovery could support the use of archaea in ...

It is thought that eukaryotes arose when two types of single cell merged, with one engulfing the other. A cell from the domain archaea is proposed to have engulfed a bacterial cell of a type known as ...