In microbiology, microorganisms may be named after well-known scientific personalities to honor them. Such eponyms are common in the natural sciences, such as pasteurization (after the microbiologist ...

Prokaryotic single-celled organisms, the ancestors of modern-day bacteria and archaea, are the most ancient form of life on our planet, first appearing roughly 3.5 billion years ago. The first ...

All complex life forms on Earth, including plants and animals, are made up of eukaryotic cells; they are more sophisticated than bacterial or archaeal cells, which are prokaryotic. Eukaryotes have ...

Prokaryotes are single-celled organisms without nuclei and are commonly known as bacteria. Ichigomaru/Shutterstock Nearly 300 years ago the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus secured his place in ...

Scientists generally agree that eukaryotes, the domain of life whose cells contain nuclei and that includes almost all multicellular organisms, originated from a process involving the symbiotic union ...

The world’s oceans are home to microscopic organisms invisible to the human eye. The tiny creatures, known as “prokaryotes”, comprise 30% of life in the world’s oceans. These organisms play an ...

The CRISPR technology commonly used for genome editing was originally based on bacterial defense mechanisms that arose to protect against bacteriophages, though their mode of activation has largely ...

In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones. By Carl Zimmer A flurry of new studies ...

SO THAT’S where they’ve been hiding. An entirely new group of organisms discovered at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean are our closest simple-celled relatives ever found. Approximately 2 billion years ...