Complex life, eukaryotes, traces its origins to a shared ancestor among the Asgard archaea, reshaping our understanding of ...

As eukaryotic cells started to form, eukaryotic traits may have emerged in early cells about one billion years before the ...

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 ...

Scientists have been trying to learn more about archaea since these microbes were discovered in the 1970s. Their DNA is not contained in a nucleus, so they are a type of prokaryote, and were initially ...

Pyrrolysine is an important component of methyltransferase enzymes, which the archaea use to metabolize methylamine in the environment. “The need for that metabolism and availability of the machinery ...

Sperm and egg cells, or gametes, are unusual. Egg cells are some of the largest cell types, and sperm are some of the smallest. In humans, these haploid cells come together to form diploid cells. It's ...

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 ...

The beauty of the DNA code is that organisms interpret it unambiguously. Each three-letter nucleotide sequence, or codon, in ...

Hyperthermophilic archaea are true survival experts. They thrive in boiling hot springs and deep-sea vents—environments ...

An artist’s depiction of an Asgard archaeon, based on cryo-electron tomography data: the cell body and appendages feature thread-like skeletal structures, similar to those found in complex cells with ...