The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by ...

Teeny, single-cell creatures floating in the ocean may be the first organisms ever confirmed to eat viruses. Scientists scooped up the organisms, known as protists, from the surface waters of the Gulf ...

Metacaspases, ancestral homologues of the caspase family, are pivotal cysteine proteases found in a wide range of unicellular organisms, including yeasts, algae, and phytoplankton. These enzymes ...

"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative," wrote H. G. Wells. This principle—that survival requires ...

The ability of cells to self-destruct appears to be essential for cellular life. However, the existence of genetically programmed death pathways in single-cell organisms has been long debated. Thus, ...

Ribosomes, the protein factories of the cell, are essential for all living organisms. They bind to mRNA and move along the ...

Scientists have created a live-cell DNA sensor that reveals how damage appears and disappears inside living cells, capturing ...

A dog learns to sit on command, a person hears and eventually tunes out the hum of a washing machine while reading … The capacity to learn and adapt is central to evolution and, indeed, survival.

Light of the moon: a dinoflagellate seen under a microscope. Its crescent shape is bounded by a cell wall. The central orange regions are cell nuclei and bioluminescence originates in vesicles ...

When you picture a single cell, you probably imagine something super tiny that you had to look at through a microscope. But, ...

The genome is often thought of as a set of instructions for building an organism. When genes are active, they express proteins, so these active genes give rise to the characteristics of a cell. An ...

Large swaths of single-celled eukaryotes, non-bacterial single-cell organisms like microalgae, fungi or mold, can control microbiomes (a collection of tiny microbes, mostly bacteria) by secreting ...