Our single-celled ancestor lived in a world without plants, animals or oxygen-rich oceans. Yet, this seemingly simple microorganism took the first steps toward complex life. From this ancestor emerged ...

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 ...

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

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new high-definition view reveals the machine in action.

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 ...

Waterborne pathogens, particularly Cryptosporidium, pose a growing public-health risk in Australia and globally. Cryptosporidiosis notifications have increased markedly in recent years across multiple ...

Duckweed is the fastest-growing flowering plant, but new knowledge of duckweed genetics discovered by Adelaide University ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.