Genome

The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing.

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish.

Yizhi “Patrick” Cai is coordinating a global effort to write a complete synthetic yeast genome. If he succeeds, the resulting cell will be the artificial life most closely related to humans to date.

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.

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community.

Highly repetitive regions of junk DNA may be the key to a newly discovered mechanism for gene regulation.

In a year packed with fascinating discoveries, biologists pushed the limits of synthetic life, probed how organisms keep time, and refined theories about consciousness and emotional health.

Paradoxically, natural selection can sometimes seem to block organisms from evolving useful adaptations. But a new study of “fitness landscapes” and antibiotic resistance in bacteria shows that life still finds a way.