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 ...

To carefully determine the phylogenetic position of the novel Asgard lineages in relation to other Archaea and to eukaryotes, we performed various in-depth phylogenomic analyses of concatenated rRNA ...

Deep in hydrothermal vents beneath the Arctic Ocean, scientists have discovered an organism that sheds fresh light on the evolutionary link between simple and complex cellular life. The microbe and ...

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 ...

Mitochondria are membrane-bound components within cells that are often described as the cells' powerhouses. They've long been considered as essential components for life in eukaryotes, the group ...

The origin of organisms with complex cells, known as eukaryotes, is one of the most crucial parts of life’s evolutionary story. All animals, plants, and fungi are eukaryotes, and if complex cells had ...

New studies revise ideas about the symbiosis that gave mitochondria to cells and about whether the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes was one cell or many. Our planet formed a little over 4.5 ...