The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

For decades, scientists have believed that complex life began when two very different microbes joined forces, eventually ...

Asgard archaea, proposed as a new archaeal superphylum, are currently composed of five phyla Lokiarchaeota, Thorarchaeota, Odinarchaeota, Heimdallarchaeota, and Helarchaeota. Since Asgard archaea ...

The seafloor is home to around one-third of all the microorganisms on the Earth and is inhabited even at a depth of several kilometers. Only when it becomes too hot does the abundance of ...

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 ...

When you get infected with a virus, some of the first weapons your body deploys to fight it were passed down to us from our microbial ancestors billions of years ago. According to new research from ...