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 ...

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 ...

Researchers looking inside a pathogenic soil bacterium have found an organelle, a subcellular pouch, existing independently from the plasma membrane. The discovery within a prokaryotic organism ...

Chloroplasts arose from cyanobacteria, mitochondria arose from proteobacteria. Both organelles have conserved their prokaryotic biochemistry, but their genomes are reduced, and most organelle proteins ...

Prokaryotes are ancient, simple forms of life that include bacteria and archaea. These cellular life forms lack membrane-bound organelles. Those organelles, which include the nucleus and the ...

Mitochondria have long been thought to be the normal engine of a eukaryotic cell and one that was essential for the survival of fungi, plants, animals and other organisms. Now, a single-cell microbe ...

The origins of complex, nucleated cellular life – everything from amoebas to humans – may date back a lot further in Earth's ...

Previously, chemists have managed to create artificial cell walls and developed synthetic DNA to produce self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cells. Now, for the first time, researchers have used ...

For a long time it has been thought that all eukaryotes – organisms in which the DNA is enclosed in a membrane including almost all life we can see – had to contain mitochondria. Known as the “power ...

A lot happened in the hundreds of millions years separating the first and last eukaryotic common ancestors, but when and how most features arose remains a mystery. Eukaryogenesis is broadly defined as ...

THE ROAD to human beings was long and winding. But a big step on it was the first eukaryotic cell. Eukaryotes comprise the living world as it is familiar from TV documentaries: animals (humans ...