All complex life forms on Earth, including plants and animals, are made up of eukaryotic cells; they are more sophisticated than bacterial or archaeal cells, which are prokaryotic. Eukaryotes have ...

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size. Every organism visible to the ...

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 ...

Scientists generally agree that eukaryotes, the domain of life whose cells contain nuclei and that includes almost all multicellular organisms, originated from a process involving the symbiotic union ...

A lot happened in the hundreds of millions years separating the first and last eukaryotic common ancestors, but when and how most features arose remains a mystery. Eukaryogenesis is broadly defined as ...

The CRISPR technology commonly used for genome editing was originally based on bacterial defense mechanisms that arose to protect against bacteriophages, though their mode of activation has largely ...

All modern multicellular life — all life that any of us regularly see — is made of cells with a knack for compartmentalization. Recent discoveries are revealing how the first eukaryote got its start.

An international collaboration between four senior scientists from Mainz, Valencia, Madrid, and Zurich has published groundbreaking research in the journal PNAS, shedding light on the most significant ...