Eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—appeared on Earth 1.7 billion years ago, and now scientists have solved a ...

A newly discovered promoter element "start" points to a shared regulatory syntax for controlling transcription initiation in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. DNA is often described as the language ...

Our single-celled ancestor lived in a world without plants, animals or oxygen-rich oceans. Yet, this seemingly simple microorganism took the first steps toward complex life. From this ancestor emerged ...

Following the drive to understand and control bacteria, it’s becoming clear that our methods have changed the very organisms we aim to understand, increasing resistance to tried-and-true antimicrobial ...

When you get infected with a virus, some of the first weapons your body deploys to fight it were passed down to us from our microbial ancestors billions of years ago. According to new research from ...

Archaea represent a unique and ancient domain of life whose transcriptional regulation combines features of both bacterial and eukaryotic mechanisms. Unlike bacteria, many archaeal regulatory proteins ...

AIST researchers, in collaboration with JAMSTEC, Hokkaido University and Tohoku University, have succeeded in cultivating an ultrasmall bacterial strain parasitizing archaea and classified the strain ...

The origin of the nucleus remains hotly debated among scientists, but new imaging and genomic data are shedding light on this billion-year-old mystery.

Chris Greening receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health & Medical Science Council, Australian Antarctic Division, Human Frontier Science Program, and Wellcome Trust. Pok ...