In a new study, published in Cell, researchers describe a newfound mechanism for creating proteins in a giant DNA virus, comparable to a mechanism in eukaryotic cells. The finding challenges the dogma ...

In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones.

The sun has just set on a quiet mudflat in Australia’s Northern Territory; it’ll set again in another 19 hours. A young moon looms large over the desolate landscape. No animals scurry in the waning ...

In our cells, 6 feet (1.8 m) of DNA gets crammed into chromosomes that fit inside a 6-µm-wide nucleus. The proteins that help pack up that genetic material are histones, which act as spools around ...

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) Archaezoan hypothesis. (B) Symbiotic hypothesis. The shapes within the eukaryotic cell denote the nucleus, the endomembrane system, and the cytoskeleton. The irregular gray shape denotes a ...

A large proportion of microbiome research is focused on the balance of bacterial communities that live in our gut systems, and their effects on health and disease. However, the gastrointestinal ...