0 a type of microorganism (= extremely small living thing) similar to bacteria but with a different structure, thought to have existed for billions of years:
In the archaea, there is no nucleus.
Archaea are part of the intestinal flora of humans and float in pockets of pressurized water in the Earth's crust.
As much as 10 percent of the Earth's biomass lives below ground, including single-celled bacteria called archaea that feed on decaying matter.
There are some Archaea that are only found in coal heaps, which makes you wonder what they did before we started mining coal.
The researchers found that two litres of seawater contained nearly 37,000 different kinds of bacteria and nearly 3,000 types of archaea, ancient single-celled organisms.
As archaeal translation is related to eukaryotic translation, statements about eukaryotes will be assumed throughout this review to apply to archaea as well and vice versa, unless otherwise specified.
Among the discoveries that have resulted, it is found that the kingdom of archaea comprises two subgroups : euryarchaeota, which - remarkably - contain histone-like proteins, and chrenarchaeota, which do not.
In this review, we summarize the available structural and functional data on translation initiation in the context of evolution, drawing parallels between eubacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes.