Archaea are microorganisms that were only discovered in the 1970s, and scientists still have a lot to learn about them. One challenge is that archaea are difficult to raise in the laboratory. As of ...

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 ...

Ten years ago, nobody knew that Asgard archaea even existed. In 2015, however, researchers examining deep-sea sediments discovered gene fragments that indicated a new and previously undiscovered form ...

There are few hard and fast rules in the study of life, but perhaps the closest we get is the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA is transcribed to RNA, which gets translated into proteins. The ...

Life is not possible without nitrogen. There are many ways for organisms to acquire nitrogen. For example, humans eat proteins for their high nitrogen content. Most microorganisms take up nitrogen ...

"Asgardians," a single lineage of archaea, may be the starting point of it all, according to a study published in the journal Nature. After investigating the genomes of hundreds of archaeal microbes, ...