Panspermia is the hypothesis that life can survive the transfer between planetary bodies as a secondary path for life to get started on planets throughout a solar system. The discovery of extraterrestrial life on asteroids ...
Think back to that basic biology class you took in high school. You probably learned about organelles, those little "organs" inside cells that form compartments with individual functions. For example, mitochondria produce ...
The microbes that cycle nutrients in the ocean don't do the work on their own—the viruses that infect them also influence the process. It's a vital job for the rest of the planet, enabling oceans to absorb half of the human-generated ...
Researchers at Umeå University have revealed details on how bacteria use calcium to regulate vital processes in a way that differs from human cells. This breakthrough is significant in the fight against antibiotic resistance ...
A recent study has uncovered critical details about the association between anaerobic ciliates and methanogenic archaea, a relationship that has fascinated scientists for over decades. Researchers from the Faculty of Science, ...
Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have revealed how Fanzor2's divergence from bacterial ancestors may make it a useful tool for future genomic engineering endeavors.
Imagine being one cartwheel away from changing your appearance. One flip, and your brunette locks are platinum blond. That's not too far from what happens in some prokaryotes, or single-cell organisms, such as bacteria, that ...
What took so long for humans to appear on Earth? The Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and life began about 4 billion years ago, yet humans—the only intelligent, technological species we know of in the universe—have existed ...
It has only recently been discovered that single-celled organisms (bacteria and archaea) also have histones—proteins that structure DNA. Now, Leiden Ph.D. candidate Samuel Schwab has found that the histones in these organisms ...
Max Planck scientists in Marburg have used a synthetic microbial community to study the gradual evolution of mutualism. The study demonstrates for the first time in detail how an evolutionary loss of independence can occur ...
