Certain microorganisms (anaerobic methanotrophic archaea, or ANME) consume methane and convert it into electricity, as ...

The beauty of the DNA code is that organisms interpret it unambiguously. Each three-letter nucleotide sequence, or codon, in a gene codes for a unique amino acid that’s added to a chain of amino acids ...

The previous installment of The Mitochondria Compendium received a great response.The three parts covered so far have dealt ...

Single-celled organisms called archaea occupy their own branch on the tree of life, like bacteria, but we know a lot less about them. Like bacteria, archaea also don't have a nucleus, and have ...

Life is not possible without nitrogen. There are many ways for organisms to acquire nitrogen. For example, humans eat proteins for their high nitrogen content. Most microorganisms take up nitrogen ...

Archaea are microorganisms that were only discovered in the 1970s, and scientists still have a lot to learn about them. One challenge is that archaea are difficult to raise in the laboratory. As of ...

Two archaeal strains that belong to a lineage closely related to the ancestor of eukaryotic cells (complex cells with membrane-bound organelles) have been brought into culture. Their simple internal ...

Tiny microorganisms related to the ancestors of every animal, plant and fungus can crawl across surfaces using flexible protrusions controlled by an actin-like internal skeleton. Researchers at the ...

Led by Jizhong Zhou, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma, an international research team conducted a long term experiment that found that ...

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 ...