Single-celled archaea microbes pack their DNA into flexible coils that expand and stretch much like a Slinky does. This kind of molecular gymnastics had never been seen before in other organisms and ...

Maddy has a degree in biochemistry from the University of York and specializes in reporting on health, medicine, and genetics. Maddy has a degree in biochemistry from the University of York and ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

Thanks to a wealth of new genomic sequence data, the family tree of Archaea, which encompassed just two phyla 16 years ago, has exploded in recent years. It now includes more than a dozen phyla, ...

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 ...

The seafloor is home to around one-third of all the microorganisms on the Earth and is inhabited even at a depth of several kilometers. Only when it becomes too hot does the abundance of ...

Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) revealed key details about the evolution of life on Earth by studying microorganisms known as Asgard archaea. The study ...

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 ...

(via PBS Eons) The unexpected discovery of an entirely new domain of life was pretty huge and surprising - even if archaea do just look like bacteria. But, in recent years, it’s been their connection ...

A newly discovered phylum of Archaea, Brockarchaeota, can break down plant and organic matter without releasing methane. An international collaboration between scientists based in the USA and China, ...

A family tree showing representatives of the major groups (phyla) of microbes in different colors. Names in red are the first 56 genomes sequenced for the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea.

Threadlike filaments pressed in rock may be the remnants of archaea that burped methane near hydrothermal vents 3.42 billion years ago. If so, these strands in rock excavated in South Africa around a ...