The origin of eukaryotes is considered one of the greatest enigmas in biology: according to current doctrine, two prokaryotes, a so-called Asgard archaeon and a bacterium, are believed to have merged.

While prokaryotic cells do not have membrane-bound structures, they do have distinct cellular regions (Figure 1). In prokaryotic cells, DNA bundles together in a region called the nucleoid. Primitive ...

All modern multicellular life — all life that any of us regularly see — is made of cells with a knack for compartmentalization. Recent discoveries are revealing how the first eukaryote got its start.

For many years, prokaryotic cells were distinguished from eukaryotic cells based on the simplicity of their cytoplasm, in which the presence of organelles and cytoskeletal structures had not been ...

Returning to the basic distinction between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, it recognises many important structural, biochemical, and genetic differences between eubacteria and archaea on the one hand and ...

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size. Every organism visible to the ...

Cell division is a fundamental process for all living organisms. Despite billion years of evolution, prokaryotes, including bacteria and archaea, utilize only a few conserved mechanisms to divide.