New vaccine design pipeline could protect against emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants and more

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical need for vaccine strategies capable of addressing emerging viral threats. Betacoronaviruses, including …

Research on the morphology, physiology and genomics of Asgard archaea has provided valuable insights into the evolutionary history of eukaryotes1–3. A previous study suggested that eukaryotes are nested within Heimdallarchaeia4, but their exact phylogenetic placement within Asgard archaea remains controversial4,5. This debate complicates understanding of the metabolic features and timescales of early eukaryotic ancestors. Here we generated 223 metagenome-assembled nearly complete genomes of Asgard archaea that have not previously been documented. We identify 16 new lineages at the genus level or higher, which substantially expands the known phylogenetic diversity of Asgard archaea. Through sophisticated phylogenomic analysis of this expanded genomic dataset involving several marker sets we infer that eukaryotes evolved before the diversification of all sampled Heimdallarchaeia, rather than branching with Hodarchaeales within the Heimdallarchaeia. This difference in the placement of euk

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This is an immersive research-based course designed to teach basic concepts, open research questions, and facilitate state-of-the-art experimental approaches in symbiosis research.

The Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE) unexpectedly becomes the longest-running polyploidy evolution experiment, shedding light on how whole-genome duplication can arise, persist...

In a recent study, scientists at Leipzig University have for the first time demonstrated play-like behaviour in flies. They found that fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) voluntarily and repeatedly ...

The deadly cancer is often not found until it has spread to other parts of the body.

A high-throughput, noninvasive, rapid protease-activated nanosensor identifies patients with pancreatic cancer in a small volume of blood.

In 2021, a year before ChatGPT took the world by storm amid the excitement about generative artificial intelligence (AI), AlphaFold 2 cracked the 50-year-old protein-folding problem, predicting three-...

An ant that disappears into the forest floor, a bird that demands attention from mates—for these animals, an inky black exterior is an evolutionary advantage.

Thomas, Feng, et al. introduce a synthetic platform that allows the building of complex regulatory landscapes. Integrating the same enhancer at different distances from a promoter uncovered that activ...