Our single-celled ancestor lived in a world without plants, animals or oxygen-rich oceans. Yet, this seemingly simple microorganism took the first steps toward complex life. From this ancestor emerged ...

Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.

Around 1.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—first appeared on Earth, and now scientists have ...

What is the last common ancestor of all plants and animals? Where did complex life come from and when? Scientists have been trying to answer these questions for many years. A new finding has changed ...

Elizabeth Kellogg, PhD, St. Jude Department of Structural Biology, used cryo-EM to study the evolutionary journey of Fanzor2, a compact eukaryotic genome-editing protein with huge potential. (MEMPHIS, ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

The origin of the nucleus remains hotly debated among scientists, but new imaging and genomic data are shedding light on this billion-year-old mystery.

The sun has just set on a quiet mudflat in Australia’s Northern Territory; it’ll set again in another 19 hours. A young moon looms large over the desolate landscape. No animals scurry in the waning ...

A new study provides unprecedented insights into the cellular architecture of over 200 species of plankton using ultrastructure expansion microscopy. Dudin had been working with this particular group ...

Scientists have revealed how Fanzor2's divergence from bacterial ancestors may make it a useful tool for future genomic engineering endeavors. A revolution in biomedicine is currently underway, driven ...