For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable ...

To carefully determine the phylogenetic position of the novel Asgard lineages in relation to other Archaea and to eukaryotes, we performed various in-depth phylogenomic analyses of concatenated rRNA ...

Genome fragments are sometimes transferred from bacteria to eukaryotes via horizontal gene transfer (HGT). When these DNA fragments contain genes, these genes can retain their functionality in some ...

For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable ...

The origin of organisms with complex cells, known as eukaryotes, is one of the most crucial parts of life’s evolutionary story. All animals, plants, and fungi are eukaryotes, and if complex cells had ...

It’s freecycling, but for DNA. Grasses routinely pass genes from one plant to another, even if they belong to distantly related species. “We’ve shown that lateral gene transfer is a widespread process ...