Single-celled archaea microbes pack their DNA into flexible coils that expand and stretch much like a Slinky does. This kind of molecular gymnastics had never been seen before in other organisms and ...

Microbiology has always been about recognizing the scale of what is unknown. In the beginning, the unknown was that microbes existed at all. The invention of the microscope proved that these tiny, ...

Archaea are a relatively recently discovered group of microorganisms that occupy their own branch on the tree of life. Though similar in some ways to bacteria, they are not the same. Researchers have ...

Just call them archaea (ar-kee-uh) - archaebacteria are no more. Archaea were once considered to be quite similar to bacteria, but these prokaryotes are just weird enough to be classified in their own ...

Archaea and bacteria are two different domains of cellular life. They are both prokaryotes, as they are unicellular and lack a nucleus. They also look similar (even under a microscope). However, DNA ...

As bacteria become increasingly resistant to antibiotics and other antibacterials, there is a growing need for alternatives. In a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, Tobias ...

Archaea—one of the three primary domains of life alongside bacteria and eukaryotes—are often overlooked and sometimes mistaken for bacteria due to their single-celled nature and lack of a nucleus. Yet ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

A first look into the molecular defenses of archaea highlights the importance of surveying diverse microbes to discover new types of antimicrobials. As bacteria become increasingly resistant to ...

It turns out your skin is crawling with single-celled microorganisms -- and they're not just bacteria. A study has found that the skin microbiome also contains archaea, a type of extreme-loving ...

The biodiversity of the Earth never ceases to astonish. One example that has radically changed the face of biology is the discovery of a group of organisms called archaea (pronounced “ar-kee-ah”). It ...

The Archaea was recognized as a third domain of life 40 years ago. Molecular evidence soon suggested that the Eukarya represented a sister group to the Archaea or that eukaryotes descended from ...