Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

The tiny pantheon known as the Asgard archaea bear traits that hint at how plants, animals and fungi emerged on Earth.

In 1977, Woese and Fox proposed the Archaea as a new domain of life and that the tree of life is divided into three branches — the Eukarya, Bacteria and Archaea. Although a three-domain tree was ...

A newly discovered promoter element "start" points to a shared regulatory syntax for controlling transcription initiation in ...

At the microscopic edge of biology, researchers have uncovered an organism so stripped down that it forces a rethink of what ...

In the late 1970s, a new branch was added to the tree of life, and archaea joined bacteria and eukarya, as domain classifications. Archaea and bacteria are both simple forms of cells called ...

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) departed long ago, taking its evolutionary secrets to the grave or—more likely—the environs of a deep sea vent. Yet clues remain, scattered among the genomes ...

Just call them archaea (ar-kee-uh) - archaebacteria are no more. Archaea were once considered to be quite similar to bacteria, but these prokaryotes are just weird enough to be classified in their own ...

A genetic analysis of soil samples indicates that a group of microorganisms called crenarchaeota are the Earth’s most abundant land-based creatures that oxidize ammonia, according to an international ...

Let’s say you’ve discovered a new bacterium or archaea and want to give it a name so that it can be classified and placed on the appropriate branch of the tree of life. According to the International ...

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 ...

Scientists describe a previously unknown phylum of aquatic Archaea that are likely dependent on partner organisms for growth while potentially being able to conserve some energy by fermentation. In a ...