Around 4 billion years ago there lived a microbe called LUCA: the Last Universal Common Ancestor. There is evidence that it could have lived a somewhat 'alien' lifestyle, hidden away deep underground in iron-sulfur rich hydrothermal ...
Diversity, be it genetic, morphological, behavioural or ecological, is at the heart of many controversies. It fascinates us or worries us, depending on the context. But what is biological diversity? How useful is it, how ...
A team of researchers with the LTER Environmental Monitoring Observatory in the Aigüestortes National Park in Spain has found that there is seasonal variation in atmospheric microbes. In their paper published in Proceedings ...
In a recent study conducted by Hongri Gong and colleagues, a respiratory supercomplex was isolated from the bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis, and its structure was visualized at a resolution of 3.5 Å using cryo-electron ...
Almost a third of available pharmaceuticals are based on natural products. The discovery of new natural products-inspired drugs, however, is slow due to their limited chemical diversity, their high chemical complexity and ...
Scientists at Scripps Research and their collaborators have created microorganisms that may recapitulate key features of organisms thought to have lived billions of years ago, allowing them to explore questions about how ...
Scientists expect climate change influences the geographical distribution of microbes in the soil, but few studies have dug deeply into that relationship. A study published this week in mSystems suggests the connection can ...
A*STAR researchers have developed a rapid, high-throughput screening procedure that can detect RNA aptamers—special messenger RNA molecules (mRNAs) able to sense and respond to particular cellular chemicals—in a sea of normal ...
The first in-depth analyses of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) cycling in the Red Sea highlights the important role of migrating shoals of fish in sustaining deep-ocean microorganisms and potentially the global carbon cycle.
As a graduate student in the 1970s, microbiologist Richard Blakemore probably wasn't expecting to discover a new bacterial species with a never-before-seen ability. While studying bacteria that live in muddy swamps, he observed ...
