The tiny pantheon known as the Asgard archaea bear traits that hint at how plants, animals and fungi emerged on Earth.

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 ...

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

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 ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 ...

Thanks to a wealth of new genomic sequence data, the family tree of Archaea, which encompassed just two phyla 16 years ago, has exploded in recent years. It now includes more than a dozen phyla, ...

The seafloor is home to around one-third of all the microorganisms on the Earth and is inhabited even at a depth of several kilometers. Only when it becomes too hot does the abundance of ...

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 ...

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, ...

An international team of microbiologists from the Medical University of Graz, the DSMZ—German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures (Braunschweig, Germany)—and the University of Illinois (U.S ...

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.