Cell division is fundamental to life, enabling growth, reproduction, and survival across all organisms, from single-celled bacteria to complex multicellular animals. While animals and fungi share a ...

A peer-reviewed study published in Cell in March 2026 introduces “optovolution,” an in vivo directed-evolution system that uses light to breed proteins capable of switching between active and inactive ...

Researchers have created a method called optovolution that uses light to guide the evolution of proteins with dynamic behaviors. By engineering yeast cells so their survival depended on proteins ...

An international research team has made an unexpected discovery of a biased counting mechanism used by the single-celled green alga Chlamydomonas to control cell division. An international research ...

The evolution of a single cellular change into oncology-related pathology is complex, driven by mutations accumulated during cell division, cell to cell interactions, and tissue structure and ...

A research team led by Sahand Jamal Rahi at EPFL’s Laboratory of the Physics of Biological Systems has introduced a new approach called “optovolution.” This technique uses light to guide the evolution ...

Images of human cells at different stages of mitosis. Chromosomes are colored cyan, spindle microtubules in red and spindle poles are yellow. Each day, hundreds of billions of cells in our body cycle ...

Max Planck scientists discover the evolutionary “missing link” explaining the dramatic transition of the yeast centromere Centromeres play virtually the same central role across the entire tree of ...

Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center and the University of Oxford have found that a cellular housekeeping function called autophagy—by which cell components are broken down and recycled—plays a ...