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When scientists ran DNA analysis on a sediment core taken from the floor of the Arctic ocean back in 2010, they found something surprising. A previously unknown organism belonging to the strange domain of microbes called Archaea appeared to have genomic characteristics associated with a totally different domain - Eukaryota. They named their discovery Lokiarchaeota, after the Loki's Castle hydrothermal vent near Greenland where it was found; but doubt shadowed the finding. Could the sample have been contaminated by something else in the core? Now, thanks to the work of Japanese scientists, those doubts can be put to rest. For...

A newly discovered life form could help resolve one of the most contentious conundrums in modern biology. All organisms on Earth are classified as either prokaryotes, which have simple cells, or eukaryotes, which have larger, more complex cells. But the two cell types are so divergent that understanding how one evolved from the other has foxed biologists. The new microbes, reported in Nature journal, go some way to bridging that gap. They have been named Lokiarchaeota, partly after the Loki's Castle volcanic vent system lying 15km away from the site where the microbes' genetic material was isolated in cold marine...