Researchers have discovered that a single-celled organism, a close relative of animals, harbors the remnants of ancient giant viruses woven into its own genetic code. This finding sheds light on how ...

In a blow to anyone dreaming that complex life may exist elsewhere in the universe, a new study suggests we're unlikely to ...

Laboratory chemists are now edging closer to the moment when lifeless molecules first organized into the chemistry that would eventually support complex organisms. By recreating key early-Earth ...

Oxygen played a key role in the evolution of complex organisms, according to new research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. The study shows that the complexity of life forms increased earlier ...

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State biologist Matthew W. Brown, the university’s Donald L. Hall Professor of Biology, is part of an international research team whose groundbreaking discovery is ...

The world is full of unusual unicellular organisms and microbes, many of which have not been discovered yet. In 2017, scientists identified a single-celled marine organism called Chromosphaera ...

Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and plants. Ten years ago, ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single ...

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish. If ...

All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation. Further ...

The diversity of unicellular eukaryotes covered in the study, with their nucleus (blue) and microtubule cytoskeleton (magenta) stained. These organisms are so distantly related to each other as they ...

This figure presents a modern tree of Life, highlighting eukaryotes (organisms with complex cells) based on genome-scale analyses from Valt et al. (2025). The newly identified and ancient supergroup ...