Microbes

An organelle discovered inside a microbe inside a cow’s gut helps explain how livestock burps contribute to warming our planet.

Extremophiles that thrive in the most unforgiving environments aren’t just biological curiosities. Understanding their resilience has many implications for us.

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with essential stores of carbon at stake.

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

A collection of short dispatches from the field of climate microbiology conveys the contributions that single-celled life forms make to our climate system, and how we can work with them to address climate change.

Scientists have identified tubulin structures in primitive Asgard archea that may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons.

A decade ago, Karen Lloyd discovered single-celled microbes living beneath the seafloor. Now she studies how they can survive in Earth’s crust, possibly for hundreds or thousands of years, and push life’s limits of time and energy.

In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

By speedrunning ecosystems with microbes, researchers revealed intrinsic properties that may make a community susceptible to invasion.