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 ...

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 ...

Archaea—one of the three primary domains of life alongside bacteria and eukaryotes—are often overlooked and sometimes mistaken for bacteria due to their single-celled nature and lack of a nucleus. Yet ...

The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) — a class of small RNAs with a role in the regulation of gene expression — had until now been found only 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

An organism that flexibly switches between unicellular and multicellular states in response to environmental changes has been identified. The transition process occurs through three diverse pathways, ...

A ubiquitous but little-known marine organism, the choanoflagellate, is the last one-celled ancestor of humans and provides insight into how cells learned to assemble into multicelled organisms. The ...