Blow up a long balloon and two things happen: it gets longer and it gets wider. Now imagine a living cell that inflates itself under enormous pressure and yet only grows longer, never adding width.

Biologists from ETH Zurich have discovered speargun- like molecular injection systems in two types of bacteria and have described their structure for the first time. The special nanomachines are used ...

Drug-resistant bacteria are becoming harder to treat, pushing scientists to look for new antibiotic targets. Researchers have now discovered that several unrelated viruses disable a key bacterial ...

PHILADELPHIA - By combining two techniques, an international team of scientists led by researchers at The Wistar Institute has derived the "quasi-atomic" structure of a common bacteriophage, a type of ...

We often hear about bacteria, but what exactly are they? A bacterium is a living organism that consists of a single cell (unicellular). It has ...

This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine. More than 1.5 billion years ago, a momentous thing happened: Two small, primitive cells became one. Perhaps more than any event—barring the ...

Viruses attack nearly every living organism on Earth. To do so, they rely on highly specialized proteins that recognize and bind to receptors on the surface of target cells, a molecular arms race that ...

A Dartmouth College research team has reported that plasmids can force bacteria to form dense clusters in order to tolerate antibiotics which suggests a source of treatment failure that does not ...