DNA replication is a fundamental process essential for bacterial growth and survival. Initiation begins at the chromosomal origin (oriC), where the conserved initiator protein DnaA assembles into an ...

The circadian rhythm is the body's clock, and it influences physiology at the cellular level; it can help animals, including humans, know when it's time to eat, wake up or go to sleep. Recent work has ...

Transposons are critical drivers of bacterial evolution that have been studied for many decades and have been the subject of Nobel Prize winning research. Now, researchers from Cornell University have ...

A new study has found that the photosynthetic bacterium Synechococcus elongatus uses a circadian clock to precisely time DNA replication, and that interrupting this circadian rhythm prevents ...

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. Every organism visible to the ...

Deep in coastal mangroves and even inside our own mouths, biologists are finding that DNA does not always sit in a simple loop at the cell’s center. A giant microbe called Thiovulum imperiosus has now ...

What’s in a name? For microorganisms, apparently a lot. Prokaryotes are single-celled microorganisms - bacteria are an example - that are abundant the world over. They exist in the oceans, in soils, ...

Researchers shed new light on G-quadruplexes, a type of secondary DNA structure that has attracted attention as a potential therapeutic target in cancer. Every day, billions of cells in your body ...