A newly discovered promoter element "start" points to a shared regulatory syntax for controlling transcription initiation in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. DNA is often described as the language ...

When you get infected with a virus, some of the first weapons your body deploys to fight it were passed down to us from our microbial ancestors billions of years ago. According to new research from ...

The latest Virtual Issue from Genome Biology and Evolution highlights articles that provide new insight into the deep evolutionary relationships among extant organisms and the origin of eukaryotes ...

A new review study explains that extremophiles have revolutionized medicine, and are invaluable allies in the fight against climate change.

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 ...

We have developed a machine-learning approach to identify 3537 discrete orthologue protein sequence groups distributed across all available archaeal genomes. We show that treating these orthologue ...

Archaea are a major domain of prokaryotic microorganisms characterized by unique molecular and biochemical features distinguishing them from Bacteria and Eukarya. Their cell membranes typically ...

For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable ...