The earliest free-living bacteria and archaea may have emerged separately, even though both inherited the same genetic code from a shared ancestor. Metals inside hydrothermal vents may have powered ...

How and where did the first forms of life arise? These are the main questions driving research at the Institute of Molecular ...

A new study suggests bacteria and archaea independently evolved into free-living cells from a shared ancestor, challenging a ...

The work challenges the assumption that all life descended from one free-living cell. Instead, it suggests that two microbial ...

Life on Earth may have first emerged from complex chemical reactions in two different ways near a deep-sea hot spring, a new study claims. One of the biggest mysteries rattling the scientific ...

(witsawat sananrum/iStock/Getty Images Plus) The fact that you, or I, or any living creature, is here at all is a series of ...

Genes are known to move within an organism, but between organisms—that’s another story.

Originally discovered in extreme environments such as hydrothermal vents, archaea, a single-celled microorganism, can also be found in the digestive systems of animals, including humans in which they ...

An artist’s depiction of an Asgard archaeon, based on cryo-electron tomography data: the cell body and appendages feature thread-like skeletal structures, similar to those found in complex cells with ...

We tend to view ourselves and the complex cells that build us as a distinct branch of the tree of life from the compact, seemingly featureless cells of bacteria and archaea. But we’ve found that our ...

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 ...

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 ...