Prokaryotic single-celled organisms, the ancestors of modern-day bacteria and archaea, are the most ancient form of life on our planet, first appearing roughly 3.5 billion years ago. The first ...

Imagine being one cartwheel away from changing your appearance. One flip, and your brunette locks are platinum blond. That's not too far from what happens in some prokaryotes, or single-cell organisms ...

Advances in DNA sequencing have expanded our view of the microbial world, but the inability to cultivate most microbes has been a major constraint. Now, a systematic, predictive framework that ...

Transposons are critical drivers of bacterial evolution that have been studied for many decades and have been the subject of Nobel Prize winning research. Now, researchers from Cornell University have ...

In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones. By Carl Zimmer A flurry of new studies ...

Scientists generally agree that eukaryotes, the domain of life whose cells contain nuclei and that includes almost all multicellular organisms, originated from a process involving the symbiotic union ...

A new method exposes key details of the mechanism behind calcium signaling in prokaryotes for the first time. Working in a Listeria monocytogenes model, researchers from Umeå University (Sweden) led ...