Modern eukaryotic cells have proteins that enable chromosome segregation during cell division, new discoveries shed light on their origin in simpler prokaryotic organisms. Modern nucleated (eukaryotic ...

As several ribosomes are usually traveling along the mRNA at the same time, the unexpected stopping of a ribosome in the middle of the mRNA strand leads to a molecular crash, in which the ribosome ...

Prokaryotic cells, which include all bacteria and archaea, are ancient, and relatively simple compared to eukaryotic cells, which are found in fungi, plants, and animals. Scientists have long sought ...

W. Ford Doolittle is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and professor of biochemistry at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. James R. Brown is a postdoctoral fellow in ...

Cells endure starvation conditions by rewiring their metabolic pathways. For example, in yeast, ribosomes are known to coat mitochondria. Exactly how this behavior promotes survival has remained ...

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size. Every organism visible to the ...

A lot happened in the hundreds of millions years separating the first and last eukaryotic common ancestors, but when and how most features arose remains a mystery. Eukaryogenesis is broadly defined as ...

Current hypotheses suggest that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor that diversified into the variety of organisms seen today. Scientists propose that the eukaryotic branch of this family ...

All modern organisms fall into two classes, eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Eukaryotes (from the Greek meaning “true kernel”) have a cell nucleus that harbours most of the cell’s genetic information and ...