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 ...

Life is not possible without nitrogen. There are many ways for organisms to acquire nitrogen. For example, humans eat proteins for their high nitrogen content. Most microorganisms take up nitrogen ...

Just call them archaea (ar-kee-uh) - archaebacteria are no more. Archaea were once considered to be quite similar to bacteria, but these prokaryotes are just weird enough to be classified in their own ...

All multicellular living beings carry an unimaginably large number of microorganisms in and on their bodies. The microbiome, i.e. the totality of these microorganisms, forms a unit together with the ...

Single-celled archaea microbes pack their DNA into flexible coils that expand and stretch much like a Slinky does. This kind of molecular gymnastics had never been seen before in other organisms and ...

All multicellular organisms harbor an unimaginably large number of microorganisms in and on their bodies. The microbiome, i.e. the totality of these microbes, forms a functional, symbiotic unit with ...

Microbiology has always been about recognizing the scale of what is unknown. In the beginning, the unknown was that microbes existed at all. The invention of the microscope proved that these tiny, ...

Scientists describe a previously unknown phylum of aquatic Archaea that are likely dependent on partner organisms for growth while potentially being able to conserve some energy by fermentation. In a ...

Thanks to microscopy, early biologists were able to make a binary distinction: there were eukaryotes and bacteria. The former had large, complex cells with internal compartments, while the latter were ...