A newly discovered promoter element "start" points to a shared regulatory syntax for controlling transcription initiation in ...

The tiny pantheon known as the Asgard archaea bear traits that hint at how plants, animals and fungi emerged on Earth.

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 ...

A genetic analysis of soil samples indicates that a group of microorganisms called crenarchaeota are the Earth’s most abundant land-based creatures that oxidize ammonia, according to an international ...

Earth’s first life forms eventually took one of three different paths, forming the domains of Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archaea. These domains have been evolving separately for billions of years. Recent ...

Following the drive to understand and control bacteria, it’s becoming clear that our methods have changed the very organisms we aim to understand, increasing resistance to tried-and-true antimicrobial ...

AIST researchers, in collaboration with JAMSTEC, Hokkaido University and Tohoku University, have succeeded in cultivating an ultrasmall bacterial strain parasitizing archaea and classified the strain ...

When you get infected with a virus, some of the first weapons your body deploys to fight it were passed down to us from our microbial ancestors billions of years ago. According to new research from ...

In a corner of a national park where the ground steams and the air smells faintly of sulfur, scientists have stumbled on a ...

Let’s say you’ve discovered a new bacterium or archaea and want to give it a name so that it can be classified and placed on the appropriate branch of the tree of life. According to the International ...