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 ...

Maddy has a degree in biochemistry from the University of York and specializes in reporting on health, medicine, and genetics. Maddy has a degree in biochemistry from the University of York and ...

Led by Jizhong Zhou, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma, an international research team conducted a long term experiment that found that ...

Earth’s immense web of life fill three broad domains—archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. Scientists from Monash University recently discovered hydrogen-producing enzymes in archaea, which were thought to ...

A newly discovered phylum of Archaea, Brockarchaeota, can break down plant and organic matter without releasing methane. An international collaboration between scientists based in the USA and China, ...

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 ...

The emergence of eukaryotic cells is considered as a critical biological evolutionary event on Earth. The origin of eukaryotes and eukaryosis are frontier issues in both life and Earth sciences.

A family tree showing representatives of the major groups (phyla) of microbes in different colors. Names in red are the first 56 genomes sequenced for the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea.

How do scientists study and classify life-forms? How can we understand the complex evolutionary connections between living organisms? Woese's breakthrough was momentous for at least three reasons.

Threadlike filaments pressed in rock may be the remnants of archaea that burped methane near hydrothermal vents 3.42 billion years ago. If so, these strands in rock excavated in South Africa around a ...