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

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 ...

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 ...

AIST researchers, in collaboration with JAMSTEC, Hokkaido University and Tohoku University, have succeeded in cultivating an ultrasmall bacterial strain parasitizing archaea and classified the strain ...

Endosymbiotic organisms have to live inside of another to survive, and this relationship often provides benefits for both the host and its resident. It may seem unusual, but complex cells are thought ...

A parasite that not only feeds of its host, but also makes the host change its own metabolism and thus biology. NIOZ microbiologists Su Ding and Joshua Hamm, Nicole Bale, Jaap Damsté and Anja Spang ...

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.

LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" of all living organisms, lived 4.32–4.52 billion years ago, according to a study from NIOZ biologists Tara Mahendrarajah and senior author Anja Spang, with ...