Blow up a long balloon and two things happen: it gets longer and it gets wider. Now imagine a living cell that inflates itself under enormous pressure and yet only grows longer, never adding width.

Biologists from ETH Zurich have discovered speargun- like molecular injection systems in two types of bacteria and have described their structure for the first time. The special nanomachines are used ...

PHILADELPHIA - By combining two techniques, an international team of scientists led by researchers at The Wistar Institute has derived the "quasi-atomic" structure of a common bacteriophage, a type of ...

Researchers have discovered and characterized at the atomic level a mechanism that enables bacterial pathogens—including ...

We often hear about bacteria, but what exactly are they? A bacterium is a living organism that consists of a single cell (unicellular). It has ...

This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine. More than 1.5 billion years ago, a momentous thing happened: Two small, primitive cells became one. Perhaps more than any event—barring the ...

Viruses attack nearly every living organism on Earth. To do so, they rely on highly specialized proteins that recognize and bind to receptors on the surface of target cells, a molecular arms race that ...