Our multicellular bodies containing trillions of cells seem to have little in common with protists, the tiny single-celled creatures inhabiting every drop of water, which spend their days eating bacteria or each other, parasitizing larger organisms or living from light. And yet, this is how... click to read more

It was the greatest leap in evolution since the emergence of life on Earth. So-called eukaryotic cells, the building blocks of all multicellular organisms like you and me, animals, plants, fungi, and also a whole zoo of single-celled protists, evolved from a common ancestor more... click to read more

The Tara Oceans consortium recently published five scientific papers in the journal Science presenting the initial wave of scientific results from the first six years of the project.1-5 The findings show the extraordinary diversity of plankton in the world’s oceans, uncover many of the... click to read more

Many organisms, ourselves included, host diverse communities of microorganisms that live on and within us. Plenty of these are bacteria and with time, some adapt to live and depend so intimately with their hosts that eventually, life without them is almost impossible. However, in some... click to read more