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 ...

Animals, from worms and sponges to jellyfish and whales, contain anywhere from a few thousand to tens of trillions of nearly genetically identical cells. Depending on the organism, these cells arrange ...

Cell division is one of the most fundamental and complex processes underpinning life. In human cells, thousands of molecules ...

Animals and fungi predominantly use two different modes of cell division -- called open and closed mitosis, respectively. A new study has shown that different species of Ichthyosporea -- marine ...

An organism grows and repairs its body using a form of cell division known as mitosis. To divide, a cell must replicate the chromosomes, which carry the DNA (the instructions needed to build the body) ...

Cell division is an essential process for all life on Earth, yet the exact mechanisms by which cells divide during early embryonic development have remained elusive—particularly for egg-laying species ...

This figure presents a modern tree of Life, highlighting eukaryotes (organisms with complex cells) based on genome-scale analyses from Valt et al. (2025). The newly identified and ancient supergroup ...

Up until recently, habituation -- a simple form of learning -- was deemed the exclusive domain of complex organisms with brains and nervous systems, such as worms, insects, birds, and mammals. But a ...

An international research team led from Uppsala University in Sweden has identified a metabolic shift in ancient microbes that helps explain how Earth’s first complex cells arose from a merger of ...

Researchers at Umeå University, Sweden, have discovered that how a special protein complex called the Mediator moves along genes in DNA may have an impact on how cells divide. The discovery may be ...

A group of researchers has won a large science prize for a discovery not quite two decades in the making. It was long thought that only simple microbes had mastered a chemical conversion reaction that ...