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

Animals, from worms and sponges to jellyfish and whales, contain anywhere from a few thousand to tens of trillions of nearly genetically identical cells. Depending on the organism, these cells arrange ...

Humans have it. So does Drosophila. But not yeast. That "it" is a small pause at the start of gene activity—a brief molecular halt that may have helped life evolve from simple cells to complex animals ...

Deep learning models have shown great potential in predicting and engineering functional enzymes and proteins. Does this prowess extend to other fields of biology as well? Contrary to expectations, a ...

ARLINGTON, Va.– According to a new report, complex cells like those in the human body probably resulted from the fusion of genomes from an ancient bacterium and a simpler microbe, Archaea, best known ...

The origins of complex, nucleated cellular life – everything from amoebas to humans – may date back a lot further in Earth's history than we thought. A new study tracing the earliest steps toward ...

Life on Earth began simply. For billions of years, tiny microbes ruled the planet. Then, one day in deep time, something changed. Cells gained a nucleus, built inner compartments and learned to ...

Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), and at Harvard Medical School have used mathematical modeling to show how individual cells appear capable of learning, a behavior once deemed ...

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been a critical turning point for life on Earth. For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the ...