When you become infected with a virus, some of the first weapons your body deploys to fight it are those passed down to us from our microbial ancestors billions of years ago. According to new research from The University ...
An international team of geneticists and molecular biologists has discovered the first-known, free-living eukaryote to have lost its mitochondria. In their study, published in Nature Communications, the group found the eukaryote ...
With a new understanding of past life on the planet through fossils, a Mississippi State biological sciences faculty member is helping researchers better predict Earth's future.
Many organisms react to the smell of deadly pathogens by reflexively avoiding them. But a recent study from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that the nematode C. elegans also reacts to the odor of pathogenic ...
Ciliates, a group of single-celled ciliated eukaryotes, have been studied since the dawn of light microscopy, with over 10,000 species described. Cilia are the key feature of ciliates and contribute to their diversity. They ...
Biodiversity loss is one of the most alarming threads the planet faces. Degraded habitats, overexploited resources, climate crisis and invasive species are some of the factors that threaten the richness and variety of living ...
Plants have long been known to release chemicals to respond to stress and relay information to their neighbors. A team of scientists from Bigelow Laboratory have shown that glaucophytes, a small group of single-celled algae ...
For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth—a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as the Equator—a new creature burst into existence: ...
Some bacteria, it turns out, have proteins much like ours that organize the DNA in their cells. They just do it a bit differently. This is revealed by new research from biochemists at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry and ...
An international scientific team has redefined our understanding of archaea, a microbial ancestor to humans from two billion years ago, by showing how they use hydrogen gas.
