All multicellular living beings carry an unimaginably large number of microorganisms in and on their bodies. The microbiome, i.e. the totality of these microorganisms, forms a unit together with the ...

Microbiology has always been about recognizing the scale of what is unknown. In the beginning, the unknown was that microbes existed at all. The invention of the microscope proved that these tiny, ...

An international team of microbiologists from the Medical University of Graz, the DSMZ—German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures (Braunschweig, Germany)—and the University of Illinois (U.S ...

Just call them archaea (ar-kee-uh) - archaebacteria are no more. Archaea were once considered to be quite similar to bacteria, but these prokaryotes are just weird enough to be classified in their own ...

Thanks to microscopy, early biologists were able to make a binary distinction: there were eukaryotes and bacteria. The former had large, complex cells with internal compartments, while the latter were ...

Even hyperthermophiles, which grow optimally at temperatures of more than 80°C, require a functional heat-shock response to cope with exposure to temperatures that exceed their optimal growth ...

Archaea are usually minor components of a microbial community and dominated by a large and diverse bacterial population. In contrast, the SM1 Euryarchaeon dominates a sulfidic aquifer by forming ...