Shedding light on the origin of complex life forms

How did the complex organisms on Earth arise? This is one of the big open questions in biology. A collaboration between the working groups of Christa Schleper at the University of Vienna and Martin Pilhofer at ETH Zurich ...

Oxygen's ups and downs in the early atmosphere and ocean

Most researchers imagine the initial oxygenation of the ocean and atmosphere to have been something like a staircase, but with steps only going up. The first step, so the story goes, occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, ...

Study Reveals Unexpected Ancient Cellular Structure

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at North Carolina State University have effectively lifted the veil from the structure of an ancient and important RNA-protein complex essential for the biosynthesis and function of the ribosome, ...

Algae as vessels for synthetic biology

Algae (a term used to group many photosynthetic organisms into a rather heterologous mash-up) do not have a kind place in the public imagination. Take for example the following passage from Stephen King's Pet Semetary:

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