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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

For billions of years, single-celled creatures had the planet to themselves, floating through the oceans in solitary bliss. Some microorganisms attempted multicellular arrangements, forming small ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii, a close cousin of animals. In red, the membranes and in blue the nuclei with their DNA. The image was obtained ...