Over the past 25 years each of the basic molecular mechanisms of the Archaea that our laboratory has studied was found to exhibit either archaea-specific features or features closely related to those of eukarya. These include the initiation of transcription, translation, intron splicing, integration, transposition, plasmid and inter-cellular conjugation and last, but not least, the remarkable viruses. Comparative analyses of the archaeal genomes have reinforced and extended many of these findings and opened up exciting new avenues of research. In my talk I will go through some of these intriguing and often surprising developments which have contributed to the radical reshaping of our views of evolutionary biology.
