The origin of life entails a continuum from simple prebiotic chemistry to cells with genes and
molecular machines. Using life as a guide to this continuum, we consider how selection …

The nature of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), its age and its impact on the Earth
system have been the subject of vigorous debate across diverse disciplines, often based on …

The bacterial cell envelope is a complex multilayered structure conserved across all
bacterial phyla. It is categorized into two main types based on the number of membranes …

Practical experiments drive important scientific discoveries in biology, but theory‐based
research studies also contribute novel—sometimes paradigm‐changing—findings. Here, we …

The timing of early cellular evolution, from the divergence of Archaea and Bacteria to the
origin of eukaryotes, is poorly constrained. The ATP synthase complex is thought to have …

The popularity of relaxed clock Bayesian inference of clade origin timings has generated
several recent publications with focal results considerably older than the fossils of the clades …

Terpenoids, also known as isoprenoids, are the largest and most diverse class of organic
compounds in nature and are involved in many membrane-associated cellular processes …

Heterocytes, specialized cells for nitrogen fixation in cyanobacteria, are surrounded by
heterocyte glycolipids (HGs), which contribute to protection of the nitrogenase enzyme from …

ALE and GeneRax are tools for probabilistic gene tree–species tree reconciliation. Based on
a common underlying statistical model of how gene trees evolve along species trees, these …

The origin of microbial mercury methylation has long been a mystery. Here, we employed
genome-resolved phylogenetic analyses to decipher the evolution of the mercury …