Transcriptomics is a powerful tool for understanding gene structures and RNA-based regulation in any organism. In contrast to the classical 'single gene' reductionist approach, in which biological ...

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size. Every organism visible to the ...

While prokaryotic cells do not have membrane-bound structures, they do have distinct cellular regions (Figure 1). In prokaryotic cells, DNA bundles together in a region called the nucleoid. Primitive ...

Modern eukaryotic cells have proteins that enable chromosome segregation during cell division, new discoveries shed light on their origin in simpler prokaryotic organisms. Modern nucleated (eukaryotic ...

The origin of eukaryotes is considered one of the greatest enigmas in biology: according to current doctrine, two prokaryotes, a so-called Asgard archaeon and a bacterium, are believed to have merged.

New insights have been gained from the most comprehensive tree of prokaryotic life assembled to date, report scientists. Bacteria were the original masters of their domain, having Earth to themselves ...

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 ...