Ten years ago, nobody knew that Asgard archaea even existed. In 2015, however, researchers examining deep-sea sediments discovered gene fragments that indicated a new and previously undiscovered form ...

Scientists trace an ancient microbe, Asgard archaea, that gave rise to humans, animals, and plants more than 2 billion years ago.

Microbiology has always been about recognizing the scale of what is unknown. In the beginning, the unknown was that microbes existed at all. The invention of the microscope proved that these tiny, ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

Archaea and bacteria are two different domains of cellular life. They are both prokaryotes, as they are unicellular and lack a nucleus. They also look similar (even under a microscope). However, DNA ...

The biodiversity of the Earth never ceases to astonish. One example that has radically changed the face of biology is the discovery of a group of organisms called archaea (pronounced “ar-kee-ah”). It ...

Single-celled archaea microbes pack their DNA into flexible coils that expand and stretch much like a Slinky does. This kind of molecular gymnastics had never been seen before in other organisms and ...

Researchers discover a unique genetic code in Antarctic archaea that encodes a rare amino acid, potentially advancing protein ...

Archaea are the third domain of life, separate from the domains of bacteria and eukaryotes. While bacteria and archaea are both unicellular organisms that lack a nucleus, they are very different in ...