Archaea—one of the three primary domains of life alongside bacteria and eukaryotes—are often overlooked and sometimes mistaken for bacteria due to their single-celled nature and lack of a nucleus. Yet ...

Our single-celled ancestor lived in a world without plants, animals or oxygen-rich oceans. Yet, this seemingly simple microorganism took the first steps toward complex life. From this ancestor emerged ...

The structure of how DNA is stored in archaea makes a significant difference to how quickly it evolves, according to a new study by Indiana University researchers. The study, led by molecular ...

An artist’s depiction of an Asgard archaeon, based on cryo-electron tomography data: the cell body and appendages feature thread-like skeletal structures, similar to those found in complex cells with ...

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 ...

Recently, a novel procedure, ORF (an acronym for ostensible recognition of folds), was developed to identify protein homologs in genomic databases 1. As an initial test, ORF was used to predict a gene ...

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 ...

Archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes are what biologists call the three domains of life. Of these three, archaea form an important link within the evolutionary theory. They are the direct ancestors of ...

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 ...