Eukaryotic cells grow and divide through a specific series of cellular events. These events are tightly controlled, ensuring that the resultant daughter cells are free of DNA errors, and subject to ...

The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of ...

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 ...

Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.

The origin of the nucleus remains hotly debated among scientists, but new imaging and genomic data are shedding light on this billion-year-old mystery.

Around 1.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—first appeared on Earth, and now scientists have ...

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size. Every organism visible to the ...

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has named Grant King, PhD, a Hanna H. Gray Fellow — investing up to $1.5 million for up to eight years to help King achieve his goal of running his own lab. He is ...

Protists are a diverse, polyphyletic assemblage of predominantly unicellular eukaryotic organisms that do not fit within the traditional kingdoms of animals, plants, or fungi and are therefore used as ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

How did cells evolve a process to end their own lives? Recent research suggests that apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death, first arose billions of years ago in bacteria with a primitive ...