Rule-breaking discovery: Researchers found a pond protist that reassigns all three standard genetic stop codons to amino acids, overturning a long-held view of code universality. Why it matters: The ...

A routine experiment with a new single-cell DNA sequencing method turned into a surprising scientific twist when researchers ...

Researchers from the Earlham Institute, in collaboration with the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, have discovered three previously unrecognized lineages of the protist Bodo, each ...

Unexpected genetic twist: A freshwater protist was found to repurpose two or even all three genetic stop codons to build proteins, overturning a core rule of molecular biology. Why it matters: This ...

Just as the human body serves as a habitat for bacteria and other microbes, diverse, tiny organisms known as protists host their own microbiomes. In new research published this week, a team led by ...

Protists are a diverse, polyphyletic assemblage of predominantly unicellular eukaryotic organisms that do not fit within the traditional kingdoms of animals, plants, or fungi and are therefore used as ...

The bodies of unicellular organisms called protists can contract extremely fast. Analysis reveals that the flow of surrounding fluid during contraction triggers a chain reaction of contraction of ...

Since the Victorian era, categorizing the natural world has challenged scientists. No group has presented a challenge as tricky as the protists, the tiny, complex life forms that are neither plants ...

The world is full of unusual unicellular organisms and microbes, many of which have not been discovered yet. In 2017, scientists identified a single-celled marine organism called Chromosphaera ...