Latest Organism Stories

Microbes are living more than 500 feet beneath the seafloor in 5 million-year-old sediment, according to new findings by researchers at the University of Delaware and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Genetic material in mud from the bottom of the ocean — called the deep biosphere —revealed an ecosystem of active bacteria, fungi and other microscopic organisms at depths deeper than a skyscraper is high. The findings were published in Nature on June 12. “This type of...

Thermophiles, humans share ancient machinery used in cell division Biologists from Indiana University and Montana State University have discovered a striking connection between viruses such as HIV and Ebola and viruses that infect organisms called archaea that grow in volcanic hot springs. Despite the huge difference in environments and a 2 billion year evolutionary time span between archaea and humans, the viruses hijack the same set of proteins to break out of infected cells. In...

Penn State Spindle-shaped inclusions in 3 billion-year-old rocks are microfossils of plankton that probably inhabited the oceans around the globe during that time, according to an international team of researchers. "It is surprising to have large, potentially complex fossils that far back," said Christopher H. House, professor of geosciences, Penn State, and lead author. However, the researchers not only showed that these inclusions in the rocks were biological in origin, but also...

Vanderbilt University These days, phylogeneticists – experts who painstakingly map the complex branches of the tree of life – suffer from an embarrassment of riches. The genomics revolution has given them mountains of DNA data that they can sift through to reconstruct the evolutionary history that connects all living beings. But the unprecedented quantity has also caused a serious problem: The trees produced by a number of well-supported studies have come to contradictory conclusions....

University of Oxford Tiny 1,900 million-year-old fossils from rocks around Lake Superior, Canada, give the first ever snapshot of organisms eating each other and suggest what the ancient Earth would have smelled like. The fossils, preserved in Gunflint chert, capture ancient microbes in the act of feasting on a cyanobacterium-like fossil called Gunflintia – with the perforated sheaths of Gunflintia being the discarded leftovers of this early meal. A team, led by Dr David Wacey of...

3-year study offers new evidence about where scientists should be looking A structural biologist at the Florida State University College of Medicine has made discoveries that could lead scientists a step closer to understanding how life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago. Professor Michael Blaber and his team produced data supporting the idea that 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 billion years ago were capable of forming foldable proteins in a high-salt...

Predictability is often used synonymously with “boring,” as in that story or that outcome was so predictable. For practitioners of synthetic biology seeking to engineer valuable new microbes, however, predictability is the brass ring that must be captured. Researchers with the multi-institutional partnership known as BIOFAB have become the first to grab at least a portion of this ring by unveiling a package of public domain DNA sequences and statistical models that greatly increase the...

University of Montreal University of Montreal researchers found that changes in gravity affect the reproductive process in plants. Gravity modulates traffic on the intracellular "highways" that ensure the growth and functionality of the male reproductive organ in plants, the pollen tube. "Just like during human reproduction, the sperm cells in plants are delivered to the egg by a cylindrical tool. Unlike the delivery tool in animals, the device used during plant sex consists of a single...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Important genetic clues about the history of a group of ancient microorganisms called archaea and the origins of life itself have been discovered by a team of researchers. Results of this first-of-its-kind study shed light on one of Earth's oldest life forms. "Archaea are an ancient form of microorganisms, so everything we can learn about them could help us to answer questions about the origin of life," explained William Whitman,...

John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Where did we come from? It is the question that has faced scientists, theologians and philosophers for millennia. And even in this age of technology, we have yet to stumble across the answer. One of the challenges is that it seems that living cells are difficult to make. Not only are they relatively complex structures, but also putting them together in such a way as to put into motion a metabolic system that can take...