When Kostas Konstantinidis proved that many bacteria—like plants and animals—are organized into species, he upended a long-held scientific belief. Scientists widely believed that bacteria, due to ...

New research reveals that bacteria form species and maintain cohesion through frequent DNA exchange within species. This process, homologous recombination, reinforces distinct species boundaries and ...

Bacteria reproduce by cloning themselves through binary fission - a kind of asexual reproduction. In the right conditions, they can reproduce very quickly. Some species can replicate themselves in ...

Those outlier liaisons gave whiptails robust heterozygosity, which has been preserved by the identical replication—essentially, cloning—that occurs in asexual reproduction. It’s a genetic ...

Imagine a gene that promotes sexual reproduction, such as by making it more likely that a plant will reproduce via sexually produced seeds as opposed to some asexual process (e.g., budding ...