Multicellular organisms (animals, plants, humans) all have the ability to methylate the cytosine base in their DNA. This process, a type of epigenetic modification, plays an important role in ...

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Scientists are discovering ways in which single cells might have evolved traits that entrenched ...

Researchers have discovered and characterized a new organism that will help scientists understand the molecular mechanisms and ancestral genetic toolkit that enabled animals and fungi to evolve into ...

Throughout the history of life on Earth, multicellular life evolved from single cells numerous times, but explaining how this happened is one of the major evolutionary puzzles of our time. However, ...

At some point, organisms changed and grew from a single cell into one made up of many cells. But how that happened is not well understood. New work by graduate candidate Jonathan Featherston of the ...

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a ...

Unicellular organisms show surprising complexity In a paper appearing in Nature Genetics, researchers discover that in more "primitive" unicellular organisms, both the adenine and the cytosine bases ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

The temperature-size rule (TSR) is an intraspecific phenomenon describing the phenotypic plastic response of an organism size to the temperature: individuals reared at cooler temperatures mature to be ...

In the multicellular soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, some cells start producing lots of antibiotics after mutations delete big chunks of their genomes. Now a computer model has helped to ...