Prokaryotic cells, which include all bacteria and archaea, are ancient, and relatively simple compared to eukaryotic cells, which are found in fungi, plants, and animals. Scientists have long sought ...

Modern eukaryotic cells have proteins that enable chromosome segregation during cell division, new discoveries shed light on their origin in simpler prokaryotic organisms. Modern nucleated (eukaryotic ...

For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable ...

A new study challenges a popular scenario put forward to explain the arrival of the first eukaryotic organisms. In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, ...

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

The discovery that a group of cell-infecting bacteria lived roughly 2 billion years ago stirs a longstanding controversy around which came first: phagocytosis or mitochondria. The ability of one cell ...

A bizarre bacteria has been discovered with an ability previously thought impossible for its kind. This strange discovery could shine a light on how some of our earliest single-celled ancestors formed ...

Encouraged by these results, Dudin, Dey, Guichard, and Hamel launched a close collaboration. Three years later, their work has produced near-encyclopedic insight into hundreds of protist species and ...

Another potentially game-changing discovery has come out of the lab of Feng Zhang, PhD. This time, they uncovered the first programmable RNA-guided system in eukaryotes. Just a few months ago, the ...

All modern organisms fall into two classes, eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Eukaryotes (from the Greek meaning “true kernel”) have a cell nucleus that harbours most of the cell’s genetic information and ...