Engineering alternative fuel with cyanobacteria

(Phys.org)—Sandia National Laboratories Truman Fellow Anne Ruffing has engineered two strains of cyanobacteria to produce free fatty acids, a precursor to liquid fuels, but she has also found that the process cuts the bacteria's ...

Why eukaryotes, not bacteria, evolved complex multicellularity

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 eukaryotic cells appeared around ...

Researchers crack mystery of swirling vortexes in egg cells

Egg cells are the largest single cells on the planet. Their size—often several to hundreds of times the size of a typical cell—allows them to grow into entire organisms, but it also makes it difficult to transport nutrients ...

When was the first time life began to prey on each other?

Using the word predation may seem surprising when we talk about the first organisms that set out to eat other organisms, for they were not deadly predators with sharp teeth and claws, but small single-celled life forms that ...

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