A marine microbe gets by on the tiniest genome ever found

Meet Sukunaarchaeum, a marine microbe that rewrites the rules of 'alive'. An international team from Nottingham and Tsukuba found it carries just 189 protein-coding genes — less than half of the previous minimum for its kind. It keeps only the bare machinery needed to copy its DNA and build proteins, outsourcing everything else. Described in Current Biology, this minimalist blueprint is a window into what life truly needs.