All life shares a single root buried deep in Earth’s past. Its name? Asgard, and it rewrites what we thought we knew.

Following the drive to understand and control bacteria, it’s becoming clear that our methods have changed the very organisms we aim to understand, increasing resistance to tried-and-true antimicrobial ...

Viruses typically aren’t considered ‘alive,’ as many core biological functions are outsourced to their hosts. But a newly discovered organism appears to straddle the line between virus and cell. Like ...

Ten years ago, the scientific community had no idea that a remarkable group of microbes called Asgard archaea even existed. That changed in 2015 when researchers studying deep-sea sediments stumbled ...

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 ...

Cell division is a fundamental process for all living organisms. Despite billion years of evolution, prokaryotes, including bacteria and archaea, utilize only a few conserved mechanisms to divide.

Prokaryotes are ancient, simple forms of life that include bacteria and archaea. These cellular life forms lack membrane-bound organelles. Those organelles, which include the nucleus and the ...

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, two ...

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 ...