Many insects rely on heritable bacterial endosymbionts for essential nutrients that they cannot get through their diet. A new study, published in Nature Communications, indicates that the genomes of ...

Lines of bacterial genome sequences are made to evolve independently by introducing high-activity insertion sequences, each simulating decades of evolution in the wild in just weeks. The genome ...

Certain antibiotic-resistant infections could be treated with precision medicine in the future, thanks to a new resource mapping plasmids the ultimate vehicle of rapid bacterial evolution. The ...

Bacteria have evolved to adapt to all of Earth's most extreme conditions, from scorching heat to temperatures well below zero ...

Unlike most bacteria, Caulobacterales bacteria divide asymmetrically when they reproduce, which creates two cells that look different from each other (top part of the illustration). However, the ...

Microbial organisms dominate life on Earth, but tracing their early history and evolution is difficult because they rarely fossilize. Determining when exactly a particular group of microbes first ...

Ben Woodcroft receives funding from the ARC. Adrián A. Davín does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has ...

Each year, most species of bacteria in a Wisconsin lake rapidly evolved, apparently in response to dramatically changing seasons, and then evolved back. Like Bill Murray in the movie "Groundhog Day," ...

Bacteria rarely feel impressive in everyday life, but when you zoom in, all the way in, they dominate Earth in ways that are hard to grasp without numbers. Scientists estimate that bacteria account ...