Abstract The ocean is hypothesized to have been anoxic throughout the Marinoan “Snowball Earth” event, from ca. 649 635 Ma, with potentially catastrophic implications for survival of eukaryotic life. However, precise nature redox chemistry across this critical interval, and hence factors that governed persistence eukaryotes, remains unknown. We report records pyrite iron sulfur isotopes, combin...

The Animal Kingdom is an astonishingly diverse group. Together with plants and fungi one of the three major lineages multicellular eukaryotes. Due to anthropocentrism and/or genuine scientific interest, their origin diversification are pivotal modern evolutionary biology. In last few decades, dramatic technological advances in molecular biology computational power have generated new phylogeneti...

There are many questions regarding the biological roles of non-coding DNAs (ncDNAs) in eukaryotic genome. It is noteworthy that ncDNAs, despite overwhelming majority genome still a mysterious object. From simple theoretical considerations, it follows this vast class ncDNAs should play some important role vital activity higher eukaryotes. If by their nature they not capable create specific produ...

The origin of meiosis and its adaptive function in eukaryotes, and the related problem of the origin and adaptive function of sex in eukaryotes, are fundamental issues in biology. Among eukaryotes, meiosis and sexual reproduction are widespread, occurring in single-celled eukaryotes (including protozoans such as paramecium), and fungi (e.g. yeast) and in most multicellular organisms including a...

As recognized by Irene Manton (1) at the time that the basic 9 + 2 structural uniformity of cilia and most eukaryotic flagella was first becoming recognized, these organelles are sufficiently complex that knowledge of their structure, no matter how detailed, cannot provide an understanding of their mechanisms of growth and function . In our understanding of these mechanisms, the substantial adv...

All eukaryotic DNA transposons reported so far belong to a single category of elements transposed by the so-called "cut-and-paste" mechanism. Here, we report a previously unknown category of eukaryotic DNA transposons, Helitron, which transpose by rolling-circle replication. Autonomous Helitrons encode a 5'-to-3' DNA helicase and nuclease/ligase similar to those encoded by known rolling-circle ...