They've survived for billions of years in boiling acid, deep-sea vents and salt flats. Now, some of Earth's oldest life forms—microbes called Archaea—are offering a new weapon in the fight against one ...

Just call them archaea (ar-kee-uh) - archaebacteria are no more. Archaea were once considered to be quite similar to bacteria, but these prokaryotes are just weird enough to be classified in their own ...

A parasite that not only feeds off its host, but also makes the host change its own metabolism and thus biology: NIOZ microbiologists Su Ding and Joshua Hamm, Nicole Bale, Jaap Damsté and Anja Spang ...

Microbiology has always been about recognizing the scale of what is unknown. In the beginning, the unknown was that microbes existed at all. The invention of the microscope proved that these tiny, ...

Scientists describe a previously unknown phylum of aquatic Archaea that are likely dependent on partner organisms for growth while potentially being able to conserve some energy by fermentation. In a ...

In an article published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the authors discussed the involvement of archaea, a lesser-known but important component of the human microbiome, in various ...

Editor's Note: This article was originally published at ScienceNordic. Two meters down, among the dark sediments at the bottom of the Bay of Aarhus in Denmark, scientists have discovered a crucial ...

Life is not possible without nitrogen. There are many ways for organisms to acquire nitrogen. For example, humans eat proteins for their high nitrogen content. Most microorganisms take up nitrogen ...

Thanks to microscopy, early biologists were able to make a binary distinction: there were eukaryotes and bacteria. The former had large, complex cells with internal compartments, while the latter were ...

Eukaryotes drastically differ from archaea and bacteria (collectively, prokaryotes) by the complex organization of eukaryotic cells. The signature features of this organizational complexity include ...

The last eukaryotic common ancestor primarily inherited its core genetic system from archaea. However, it remains unclear when and how these essential machineries expanded their compositional and ...