Scientists trace an ancient microbe, Asgard archaea, that gave rise to humans, animals, and plants more than 2 billion years ago.

Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and plants. Ten years ago, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Animals, from worms and sponges to jellyfish and whales, contain anywhere from a few thousand to tens of trillions of nearly genetically identical cells. Depending on the organism, these cells arrange ...

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been a critical turning point for life on Earth. For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the ...

“Expression tells us what cells do, but regulatory DNA tells us where they come from, how they develop, and which germ layer ...

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 ...