The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

Late in 2025, we covered the development of an AI system called Evo that was trained on massive numbers of bacterial genomes. So many that, when prompted with sequences from a cluster of related genes ...

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 ...

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of ...

Some single-celled organisms are known to transition to multicellularity during their lifetimes, usually either by cloning themselves or when many similar cells come together to form a larger ...

The Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has selected six papers published by PNAS in 2025 to receive the Cozzarelli Prize, an award that recognizes ...

Y-complex nucleoporin, Nup107, can regulate ecdysone production by affecting the transcription of Halloween genes and levels of RTK receptor, torso, for the metamorphic transition from larva to pupa.

By Hugo Francisco de Souza Trained on genomic data spanning the tree of life, Evo 2 reveals how artificial intelligence can ...

Gypsum is a soft, translucent sulfate mineral that allows just enough light to penetrate for photosynthetic organisms to ...

Scientists from VIB, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Saarland University, and  RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau have discovered that an important family of antioxidant enzymes can assemble in far ...