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 ...

The latest Virtual Issue from Genome Biology and Evolution highlights articles that provide new insight into the deep evolutionary relationships among extant organisms and the origin of eukaryotes ...

Researchers investigate into the various lineages of Asgard archae, and determine one related to Hods as the ancestor of ...

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 ...

A bizarre bacteria has been discovered with an ability previously thought impossible for its kind. This strange discovery could shine a light on how some of our earliest single-celled ancestors formed ...

Viruses acquire genes from eukaryotes — organisms whose cells store their DNA in a nucleus — and use them for their own function. Conversely, eukaryotes acquire genes from viruses to bring new ...