While prokaryotic cells do not have membrane-bound structures, they do have distinct cellular regions (Figure 1). In prokaryotic cells, DNA bundles together in a region called the nucleoid. Primitive ...

You know when you hear somebody start a sentence with, "There are two kinds of people..." and you think to yourself "Oh boy, here it comes." But what if I were to tell you that there are just two ...

Contrary to popular belief, bacteria have organelles too. Scientists are now studying them for insights into how complex cells evolved. Open a basic biology textbook published decades ago or one ...

The origin of the eukaryotic nucleus marked a seminal evolutionary transition. We propose that the nuclear envelope's incipient function was to allow mRNA splicing, which is slow, to go to completion ...

The defining characteristic of simple cells, or prokaryotes, is supposed to be the fact that their DNA floats freely in the cell rather than being enclosed in a nucleus. Indeed, the term “prokaryote” ...

WHEN David Baum was an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, he pondered, as students are wont to in the small hours after the bar has closed, one of biology’s most basic questions. It was this: ...

More than 1,200 metres deep in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan lies an underwater volcano named Myojin Knoll. A team of Japanese biologists have been trawling these waters for more than a ...

The first single-celled organisms with a nucleus originated more than a billion years later than biogeochemical evidence had previously indicated. In contrast to prokaryotes such as bacteria, ...

A eukaryote is any cell or organism that possesses a clearly defined nucleus. Eukaryotic cells form the foundation of complex, multicellular life, including apple trees, mushrooms, fish and humans.