Once a sperm has broken through to an egg cell in order to fertilize it, the two cells need to hold together tightly. This ...

As humans, we typically look at life and death as two sides of the same coin. However, some researchers believe there could be a "third state" between the two. One piece of evidence for this ...

The death of an organism does not spell the end for its cells, according to new research. Cells have been shown to continue to function even after the organism they originated from is deceased, often ...

Funding: W.C.R. acknowledges support from the NIH (grant no. 5R35GM138030) and NSF (CAREER Grant no. 1845363), A.J.B. acknowledges support from the Human Frontiers Science Program grant (RGY0080/2020) ...

We’re born, we live, and we die but new studies exploring the phenomenon of dead cells taking on new functions after death, also known as the “third state,” is complicating that picture. In a research ...

Over the past several years, scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that the cells of various organisms can be repurposed into biological robots, representing stunning advancements in the field of ...

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size. Every organism visible to the ...

Groundbreaking fossils unearthed in China suggest that multicellular organisms arose earlier than scientists previously thought. The fossils, of what may be an ancient type of photosynthetic alga, are ...

Many writers grouse when an editor makes a change in a story, but the consequences of changing a single word usually aren’t that dire. Not so with genetic instructions for making proteins. Even a ...

Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, researchers watched as their model organism, 'snowflake yeast,' began to adapt as multicellular individuals. In new research, the team shows how ...

Scientists believe multicellular organisms evolved from single celled life, but understanding how has been difficult. To finaly understand the process of evolution into multicellularity, researchers ...