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 ...

Eukaryote is the term describing one of the domains of living organisms, those with a nucleus and organelles bounded by internal phospholipid membrane systems. In contrast to bacteria and archaea, ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

Kobe University researchers have engineered Escherichia coli to synthesise orsellinic acid-derived meroterpenoids with anticancer, anti-HIV, antidiabetic and anti-inflammatory potential, ...

For decades, scientists have believed that complex life began when two very different microbes joined forces, eventually giving rise to plants, animals, and fungi. But one major puzzle remained: how ...

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 ...

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 ...