Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

Multicellular organisms (animals, plants, humans) all have the ability to methylate the cytosine base in their DNA. This process, a type of epigenetic modification, plays an important role in ...

A ubiquitous but little-known marine organism, the choanoflagellate, is the last one-celled ancestor of humans and provides insight into how cells learned to assemble into multicelled organisms. The ...

Metacaspases, ancestral homologues of the caspase family, are pivotal cysteine proteases found in a wide range of unicellular organisms, including yeasts, algae, and phytoplankton. These enzymes ...

Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii, a close cousin of animals. In red, the membranes and in blue the nuclei with their DNA. The image was obtained ...

An international team of researchers has achieved an unprecedented milestone: the creation of mouse stem cells capable of generating a fully developed mouse using genetic tools from a unicellular ...

Much more difficult is learning to connect different types of stimuli or events, and predicting that one is linked to another. Such associative learning was most famously demonstrated when Ivan Pavlov ...

In the May 15th issue of Genes & Development, an international collaboration of researchers, led by Dr. Yijun Qi (National Institute of Biological Sciences, China), report on their discovery of ...

The human gut microbiome is known to have a significant influence on many aspects of our health. Usually, when people think of the gut microbiome, they think of the many bacterial species that live ...

Molecular cloning is usually carried out on one gene or small DNA segment at a time. However, cloning technology has advanced to the stage that scientists have begun cloning genomes of entire ...

How is it possible to move in the desired direction without a brain or nervous system? Single-celled organisms apparently manage this feat without any problems: for example, they can swim towards food ...