Modern biology textbooks assert that only bacteria can take nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into a form that is usable for life. Plants that fix nitrogen, such as legumes, do so by harboring symbiotic bacteria ...
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen have broken new ground by demonstrating that an HMG-box gene in brown algae is crucial for determining male sex. This breakthrough significantly expands our understanding ...
Brandt Eichman and Walter Chazin, professors of biochemistry, have worked together to provide a better understanding of how exactly DNA replication is initiated in eukaryotes. Using Vanderbilt's state-of-the-art instrumentation ...
Contrary to common belief, not all viruses are harmful to their hosts. Sometimes viruses can even protect their hosts from infection by other viruses. Scientists at the Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg ...
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 ...
Originally discovered in extreme environments such as hydrothermal vents, archaea, a single-celled microorganism, can also be found in the digestive systems of animals, including humans in which they play a key role in gut ...
Researchers report February 29 in the journal Cell Reports that the Golgi ribbon, an organelle structure previously thought to be exclusive to vertebrates, is also present in animal taxa, including mollusks, earthworms, and ...
Researchers led by University of Tsukuba have discovered rdxPolA, a putative DNA polymerase involved in replicating ancestral mitochondrial genomes, in diverse eukaryotic lineages. Based on the phylogenetic distribution of ...
Single-celled organisms, such as bacteria and archaea, have developed many ways to communicate with each other. For example, they might use tiny so-called extracellular vesicles (EVs)—membrane-enveloped packages smaller than ...
The recent approval of a CRISPR-Cas9 therapy for sickle cell disease demonstrates that gene editing tools can do a superb job of knocking out genes to cure hereditary disease. But it's still not possible to insert whole genes ...
