Ten years ago, nobody knew that Asgard archaea even existed. In 2015, however, researchers examining deep-sea sediments discovered gene fragments that indicated a new and previously undiscovered form ...

Scientists trace an ancient microbe, Asgard archaea, that gave rise to humans, animals, and plants more than 2 billion years ...

Researchers discover a unique genetic code in Antarctic archaea that encodes a rare amino acid, potentially advancing protein ...

Single-celled archaea microbes pack their DNA into flexible coils that expand and stretch much like a Slinky does. This kind of molecular gymnastics had never been seen before in other organisms and ...

Jump into 2026 with a recap of UCSB's most recent research innovations.

In 1977, Woese and Fox proposed the Archaea as a new domain of life and that the tree of life is divided into three branches — the Eukarya, Bacteria and Archaea. Although a three-domain tree was ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

Microbiology has always been about recognizing the scale of what is unknown. In the beginning, the unknown was that microbes existed at all. The invention of the microscope proved that these tiny, ...

The biodiversity of the Earth never ceases to astonish. One example that has radically changed the face of biology is the discovery of a group of organisms called archaea (pronounced “ar-kee-ah”). It ...

Archaea and bacteria are two different domains of cellular life. They are both prokaryotes, as they are unicellular and lack a nucleus. They also look similar (even under a microscope). However, DNA ...