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 ...

An artist’s depiction of an Asgard archaeon, based on cryo-electron tomography data: the cell body and appendages feature thread-like skeletal structures, similar to those found in complex cells with ...

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

Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) revealed key details about the evolution of life on Earth by studying microorganisms known as Asgard archaea. The study ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Scientists recently ...

How did life leap from simple microbial cells to the complex, structured cells that make up animals, plants, and fungi? A new study in The EMBO Journal by researchers at the Indian Institute of ...

An oak tree. The symbiotic fungus intertwined with its roots. A cardinal chirping from one of its branches. Our best clue yet to their shared ancestor might have arrived in electron microscope images ...

Microbes have been engaged in an arms race with one another that goes back for millennia. While we have been able to reveal microbial defense systems like CRISPR, and we have been able to exploit some ...

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 ...

In the 1970s, an entirely new group of organisms that were not bacterial or eukaryotic was discovered - archaea. Some archaea can survive in extreme environments, such as near hot, thermal vents in ...

Two of our key defenses against viruses have persisted for billions of years, arising before complex life. A comparison of immune proteins called viperins from Asgard archaea (left) and from a group ...