As bacteria become increasingly resistant to antibiotics and other antibacterials, there is a growing need for alternatives. In a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, Tobias ...

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 ...

Archaea—one of the three primary domains of life alongside bacteria and eukaryotes—are often overlooked and sometimes mistaken for bacteria due to their single-celled nature and lack of a nucleus. Yet ...

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 ...

There are few hard and fast rules in the study of life, but perhaps the closest we get is the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA is transcribed to RNA, which gets translated into proteins. The ...

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 ...

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 ...

Life is not possible without nitrogen. There are many ways for organisms to acquire nitrogen. For example, humans eat proteins for their high nitrogen content. Most microorganisms take up nitrogen ...

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 ...

Scientists describe a previously unknown phylum of aquatic Archaea that are likely dependent on partner organisms for growth while potentially being able to conserve some energy by fermentation. In a ...