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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

All multicellular living beings carry an unimaginably large number of microorganisms in and on their bodies. The microbiome, i.e. the totality of these microorganisms, forms a unit together with the ...

All multicellular organisms harbor an unimaginably large number of microorganisms in and on their bodies. The microbiome, i.e. the totality of these microbes, forms a functional, symbiotic unit with ...

Single-celled microbes may have taught plants and animals how to pack their genetic baggage. Archaea, a type of single-celled life-form similar to bacteria, keep their DNA wrapped around proteins much ...

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 ...

There are few hard and fast rules in the study of life, but perhaps the closest we get is the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA is transcribed to RNA, which gets translated into proteins. The ...

Microbiology has always been about recognizing the scale of what is unknown. In the beginning, the unknown was that microbes existed at all. The invention of the microscope proved that these tiny, ...

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 ...

Thanks to microscopy, early biologists were able to make a binary distinction: there were eukaryotes and bacteria. The former had large, complex cells with internal compartments, while the latter were ...