A microbiome is a community of microorganisms that inhabit an ecological niche. Microbiomes exist in environmental biotopes, for example, a water body or forest soil, as well as in living ...

Ciliates, just like humans, are colonized by a vast diversity of bacteria. Some ciliates and their bacterial symbionts have become friends for life, as researchers from the Max Planck Institute for ...

In a study published in Current Biology on August 14, Prof. Miao Wei's team at the Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Zhang Jianzhi's team at the University ...

Loxophyllum is a predatory protozoan. These single-celled organisms are ciliates, being covered in hair-like structures known as cilia. The cilia beat in synchronized waves, propelling the organism ...

A newly discovered organelle may hold the key to how much methane cattle burp out. The organelle doesn’t belong to cows. It’s part of fuzzy single-celled protozoa called ciliates. The microbes live in ...

Ciliates are minute, single-celled organisms with several nuclei, and are abundant in freshwater, the oceans and soil. The name “ciliate” comes from 'cilia', tiny hair-like structures, which cover ...

Certain ciliates use traditional stop codons ambiguously during translation. Sometimes these three-base-long RNA sequences code for an amino acid (green, left), and sometimes induce translation ...

A routine experiment with a new single-cell DNA sequencing method turned into a surprising scientific twist when researchers stumbled upon a bizarre genetic code in a microscopic pond organism.