Viruses in the cold waters of the Arctic are strongly seasonal and are also detected in the Antarctic.
Ionizing radiation is known to have a destructive effect on biology by causing damage to the DNA, cells, and production of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS), among other things.
Space ionizing radiation is a major risk factor for astronauts, yet its molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood.
A world-first study led by Museums Victoria Research Institute has revealed that beneath the cold, dark, pressurised world of the deep sea, marine life is far more globally connected than […]
![a The energy diagrams above the polymers show the heights of the kinetic barriers for bond formation/dissociation in various regions. Dark- vertical bars are hydrogen bonds with high kinetic barrier, while lighter bars denote bonds with lower kinetic barriers. The balls-and-sticks diagram of polymer growth illustrates the fact that asymmetric cooperativity enables faster strand growth by lowering kinetic barrier for bond formation to the right. Asymmetric kinetic influence of a hydrogen bond on adjacent monomers (raising the barrier of the left bond and lowering it for the right) optimizes strand elongation as well as increases the duration of monomer bonding to the template strand to increase the probability of covalent bond formation. b With symmetric kinetic influence, hydrogen bonds that are away from the growth front (second bond from left) have lower kinetic barriers. Thus, monomers are drawn away from growth front, resulting in lower growth rate. This makes symmetric replicators evolutionarily inferior (From Ref [26], with permission) -- BMC Evol Biol via PubMed](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Prebiotic-Competition-And-Evolution.png?resize=1200%2C719&ssl=1)
Living systems, uniquely in nature, acquire, store and use information to maintain a highly ordered state while remaining far from thermal equilibrium. The molecular carriers of heritable information, RNA in […]
How and where did life on Earth originate? To date, various environments have been proposed as plausible sites for the origin of life. However, discussions have focused on a limited […]
We propose a hypothesis for the simultaneous emergence of bacteria, archaea, viruses, and mobile elements by sequential and concrete biochemical pathways.
Editor’s note: with recent speculation about the potential habitability of the clouds of Venus and the long-hypothesized notion of airborne life forms on Saturn and Jupiter these studies from Earth […]
The search for life beyond Earth currently hinges on the detection of biosignatures that are indicative of current or past life, with terrestrial life being the sole known example.
Chemists at UCL and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology have demonstrated how RNA (ribonucleic acid) might have replicated itself on early Earth – a key process in the origin […]
