The biodiversity of the Earth never ceases to astonish. One example that has radically changed the face of biology is the discovery of a group of organisms called archaea (pronounced “ar-kee-ah”). It ...

New research suggests that methanogens -- among the simplest and oldest organisms on Earth -- could survive on Mars. Methanogens, microorganisms in the domain Archaea, use hydrogen as their energy ...

The methanogenic Archaea (methanogens) produce nearly all biogenic methane on Earth. All known methanogens fall into the phylum Euryarchaeota, where they form six distinct orders: Methanomicrobiales, ...

Scanning electron micrograph of Methanobrevibacter smithii DSM 861 (=PS T), Methanobrevibacter smithii DSM 2375 (=ALI), Methanobrevibacter smithii GRAZ-2 and WWM1085. Credit: International Journal of ...

Archaea are the third domain of life, separate from the domains of bacteria and eukaryotes. While bacteria and archaea are both unicellular organisms that lack a nucleus, they are very different in ...

It turns out your skin is crawling with single-celled microorganisms -- and they're not just bacteria. A study has found that the skin microbiome also contains archaea, a type of extreme-loving ...

Methanogenic archaea use sophisticated enzyme systems to live in energy-limited anoxic environments. A key mechanism for saving energy is electron bifurcation, a reaction that 'splits' the energy of a ...

“The halophilic archaea had long been suspected to have evolved from a lineage of methanogens, and this new lineage is the missing link confirming this hypothesis,” William Whitman, a microbiologist ...

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, ...

NSF backs Nicole Buan’s three-year study mapping Methanosarcina acetivorans metabolism to understand methanogen biochemistry ...