title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: As they experiment with the invention, Seth and Ronnie begin to form a relationship. Using two steaks, one a control and one teleported, Seth discovers that the machine is creating a synthetic version of biological material rather than the object itself. He reprograms the system to understand the makeup of living tissue and successfully teleports a second baboon. Ronnie departs before they can celebrate, and Seth worries that she is rekindling her relationship with her editor, Stathis Borans. She actually left to confront Stathis about a veiled threat, spurred by his jealousy of Seth, to publish the telepod story without her consent. While drunk, Seth teleports himself alone, unaware that a housefly had entered the transmitter pod with him. He emerges from the receiving pod seemingly normal.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: After Seth and Ronnie reconcile, Seth exhibits sugar cravings and increased strength, agility, stamina, and sexual potency, which he believes resulted from the teleportation "purifying" his body. Ronnie becomes increasingly concerned about Seth's deteriorating sanity, as well as strange, bristly hairs growing from a wound on his back and developing sores on his face. When she expresses her worries, Seth becomes aggressive, insisting that the process is beneficial. He tries to force Ronnie to undergo teleportation, but she refuses.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Seth goes to a bar and partakes in an arm-wrestling match, leaving his opponent with a compound fracture. He brings a woman, Tawny, back to the warehouse, where they have sex. After that, Seth tries to coerce her into teleporting. However, Ronnie intervenes, and Seth throws her out. When his fingernails begin falling off, he slowly realizes that Ronnie had been telling the truth. He checks his computer's records and discovers that the telepods confused the two lifeforms, fusing him with the fly at the molecular-genetic level.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Seth continues to deteriorate, losing body parts along with his human appearance. After several weeks, he reconnects with Ronnie and reveals he is slowly becoming a hybrid creature that is neither human nor insect, which he has nicknamed "Brundlefly." He has also begun vomiting digestive enzymes onto his food before eating and is able to cling to walls and ceilings. He also discovers that he is losing his human reason and compassion and is now being driven by primitive impulses he cannot control.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Seth installs a fusion program into the telepod computer, planning to dilute the fly genes in his body with human DNA. Ronnie discovers she is pregnant with Seth's baby and has a nightmare of giving birth to a giant maggot. She demands that Stathis persuade a doctor to perform an abortion in the middle of the night, but Seth overhears Ronnie's fears and abducts her before the procedure occurs. He begs her to carry the child to term since it may be the last remnant of his humanity. Stathis breaks into Seth's lab with a shotgun, but Seth disables him using his corrosive vomit to destroy Stathis' hand and foot, stopping just short of vomiting acid onto his face when Ronnie screams at him to stop.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Seth reveals his final plan to Ronnie: he will use the telepods to fuse the two of them, along with the unborn child, into a single entity to become "the ultimate family." During a struggle, she accidentally tears off his jaw, which triggers his final transformation, shedding his decaying flesh to become a monstrous, insectoid-human creature.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Seth traps Ronnie in the first telepod, puts himself in the other, and begins the countdown. A weakened Stathis recovers his shotgun and severs the cables connecting Ronnie's telepod to the computer. Seth breaks halfway out of his own pod, but the fusion process activates, gruesomely amalgamating him with a chunk of the telepod. Seth crawls to Ronnie and places the end of the shotgun to his head, silently begging her to end his suffering. Looking on at the creature that was once Seth Brundle, she tearfully fires, killing him instantly. She falls to her knees in despair.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: In the early 1980s, co-producer Kip Ohman approached screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue with the idea of remaking the classic science fiction horror film "The Fly". Pogue began by reading George Langelaan's short story and then watching the original film, which he had never seen. Deciding that this was a project in which he was interested, he talked with producer Stuart Cornfeld about setting up the production, and Cornfeld very quickly agreed. The duo then pitched the idea to executives at 20th Century Fox and received an enthusiastic response, and Pogue was given money to write a first draft screenplay. He initially wrote an outline similar to that of Langelaan's story, but both he and Cornfeld thought that it would be better to rework the material to focus on a gradual metamorphosis instead of an instantaneous monster. However, when executives read the script, they were so unimpressed that they immediately withdrew from the project. After some negotiation, Cornfeld orchestrated a deal whereby Fox would agree to distribute the film if he could set up financing through another source.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The new producer was Mel Brooks; the film was to be produced by his company, Brooksfilms. Cornfeld was a frequent collaborator and friend of Brooks. Together, they had produced David Lynch's film "The Elephant Man". (Brooks would leave his name off the film's credits, to avoid confusing viewers who might expect "a Mel Brooks film" to be a comedy.) Cornfeld gave the script to Brooks, who liked it but felt that a different writer was needed. Pogue was then removed from the project, and Cornfeld hired Walon Green for a rewrite. However, Green's draft was not a step in the desired direction, so Pogue was then sought to polish the material. At the same time, Brooks and Cornfeld were trying to find a suitable director. Their first choice was David Cronenberg, but he was working on "Total Recall", an adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", for Dino De Laurentiis, so he was unable to accept. Cornfeld decided on a young British director named Robert Bierman after seeing one of his short films. Bierman was flown to Los Angeles to meet with Pogue, and the film was in the very early stages of preproduction when tragedy struck: Bierman's family had been vacationing in South Africa, and his daughter was killed in an accident. Bierman boarded a plane to go to his family, and Brooks and Cornfeld waited for a month before approaching him about resuming work on the picture. Bierman told them that he was unable to start working so soon, and Brooks told him that he would wait three months and contact him again. At the end of the three months, Bierman told him that he could not commit to the project. Brooks told him that he understood and had freed him from his contract.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Cornfeld then heard that Cronenberg was no longer associated with "Total Recall" and re-approached him with "The Fly". Cronenberg agreed to sign on as director if he would be allowed to rewrite the script.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Geoff and Barbara Powell are a happily married couple. Geoff, a brilliant scientist, has been working on a teleportation machine, but is unwilling to tell his employer, Phillip DeWitt, or his friend, Harry Chandler, about the nature of the project. DeWitt is greatly displeased by this, and threatens to pull his funding of the mystery project unless he is given full disclosure. After several failed experiments, such as a monkey's atoms never reintegrating after disintegration, Geoff eventually is successful in teleporting both inanimate and living objects. However, when he tries it on himself, a housefly slips into the booth with him. Seemingly normal at first, Geoff soon develops incredible strength, stamina, and energy. After sprouting fly-hairs and losing his fingernails, Geoff eventually discovers that the fly has been absorbed into his body, and that its cells are now taking over his own.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: As he slowly mutates into a giant fly, Geoff loses body parts, and becomes able to climb walls, as well as digest food with corrosive vomit. Barb is horrified to learn that she is pregnant by Geoff, and cannot be sure if the child was conceived before or after his teleportation. Eventually, Chandler discovers the teleporter's existence, reveals it to DeWitt, and demonstrates it on a cat, only to have the lost monkey atoms return from the ether and create a horrible "monkey-cat" creature, which DeWitt beats to death with a metal rod. Despite this failed experiment, DeWitt sees the substantial monetary value of the device, and so takes possession of the teleporter. Geoff (now mostly transformed into a fly-monster and unable to speak) learns of this, and goes to DeWitt's office building, followed by Barb. Geoff confronts DeWitt, starts a fire in the lab where the teleporter is now housed, and kills DeWitt by vomiting and feeding on him. He then traps himself in one of the teleportation booths just as Barb arrives to watch the fire kill him and destroy the teleporter—his intent all along. In a coma, Barb dreams of giving birth to a giant maggot, only to wake up in a hospital, where it is revealed that she's given birth to a healthy baby boy.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The revised script differed greatly from Pogue's screenplay, though it still retained the basic plot and the central concept of a gradual mutation. Cronenberg rewrote the characters and most of the dialogue from scratch (as well as fusing DeWitt and Chandler--who had romantic intentions toward Barb in the Pogue draft--into Stathis Borans), and carried over a few key moments and concepts. Certain aspects of the transformation from Pogue's draft (such as the hero's loss of body parts) were expanded upon, and Cronenberg also layered in his trademark themes of sexuality, body horror, and personal identity. He also made it a point to keep Seth Brundle as articulate as possible for as long as possible, as opposed to Pogue's draft, in which Geoff Powell loses his ability to speak two-thirds of the way through the script.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Seth Brundle's increasing mania and personality changes in the early stages of the transformation were emphasized in the rewrites, and the notion of the transformation itself being a horrible (and very metaphorical) disease became a key factor in the new script. Also, in this version, Brundle was clearly transforming into a bizarre hybrid creature as the result of a genetic fusion, whereas in Pogue's version, Powell was being taken over by the fly's cells, which had been absorbed into his body (thus slowly transforming him literally into a giant fly, rather than Brundle's deformed man-fly mixture). Cronenberg's version also retained such moments as Brundle catching a fly in mid-air, the fingernail-pulling, and the maggot-baby dream (which was moved to an earlier point in the story, and used for thematic and plot purposes rather than as an end-of-film shock moment).


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The "monkey-cat" of Pogue's script was repurposed by Cronenberg into a twisted, desperate attempt by Brundle to find a cure, and Pogue's sequence of a fly leg hatching from Geoff's side was taken one step further, with Brundle amputating the twitching limb with his teeth. Pogue's script also featured a bag lady being murdered by Geoff in an alley, and Cronenberg revised this so that the woman was killed by vomit-drop (as with DeWitt's murder at the end of the original draft) rather than Geoff cutting her throat accidentally (however, Cronenberg never filmed his version of this sequence, which was written out of the final shooting script). While Cronenberg's script did not end with Veronica Quaife giving birth, it did end with a coda which revealed that she was pregnant with a normal baby, conceived by Borans after Brundle's death (and the abortion of Brundle's possibly tainted fetus).


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Despite the extensive rewrite of Pogue's script, Cronenberg insisted during Writers Guild arbitrations that he and Pogue share screenplay credit, since he felt that his version could not have come to pass without Pogue's script to serve as a foundation.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: With a script that everyone approved of, Cronenberg assembled his usual crew and began the process of casting the picture. John Lithgow was offered the role of Seth Brundle but turned it down, stating it was too grotesque; ultimately deciding on Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis for the leads. Chris Walas, who had designed the creatures in "Gremlins", was hired to handle the film's extensive special effects. Principal photography began on December 1, 1985, in Toronto.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The producers commissioned musician Bryan Ferry to record a song for the film for promotional purposes. The resulting track was "Help Me". A music video was made for the song, and footage from the film was prominently featured in it. Cronenberg admitted to liking the song, but he felt that it was inappropriate to the film itself. Brooks and Cornfeld originally wanted to play the song over the closing credits, but after Cronenberg screened it for them, they agreed with the director that it did not mesh with the movie. As a result, the song is featured only briefly in the film, in the background during the scene where Brundle challenges Marky in the bar. "Help Me" became rather obscure, as it was not included on the film's soundtrack release. The song resurfaced in 1993 on the Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry compact disc "Ultimate Collection".


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The design of Brundle's telepods was inspired by the engine cylinder of Cronenberg's Ducati Desmo motorcycle.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: After filming ended early in 1986, a rough cut of "The Fly" was shown to Fox executives, who were very impressed. A rough cut was then previewed at Toronto's Uptown Theatre in the spring of that year. Due to a strong audience reaction, the graphic and infamous "monkey-cat" sequence was cut from the film to make it easier for audiences to maintain sympathy for Brundle's character. Another preview screening was subsequently held at the Fox lot in Los Angeles, and this version featured the "butterfly baby" coda. As before, the screening results dictated that the scene be cut.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The Academy Award-winning makeup was designed and executed by Chris Walas, Inc. over a period of three months. The final "Brundlefly" creature was designed first, and then the various steps needed to carry protagonist Seth Brundle to that final incarnation were designed afterwards. The transformation was intended to be a metaphor for the aging process. To that end, Brundle loses hair, teeth and fingernails, with his skin becoming more and more discolored and lumpy. The intention of the filmmakers was to give Brundle a bruised and cancerous look that gets progressively worse as the character's altered genome slowly asserts itself, with the final Brundlefly hybrid creature literally bursting out of Brundle's hideously deteriorated human skin. The creature itself was designed to appear horribly asymmetrical and deformed, and not at all a viable or robust organism.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Various looks were tested for the makeup effects. Some early test footage can be seen on the 2005 "The Fly": Collector's Edition DVD, as well as the Blu-ray release.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The transformation was broken up into seven distinct stages, with Jeff Goldblum spending many hours in the makeup chair for Brundle's later incarnations.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The score to "The Fly" was composed and conducted by Howard Shore, and performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was released on record, cassette and compact disc (with three additional tracks exclusively included on the latter) by Varèse Sarabande, and in 2005 was remastered and reissued on a two-disc set with Christopher Young's album for "The Fly II".


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Titles in bold are exclusive to the CD release. The soundtrack presents the music out of order from the movie's presentation.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: "The Fly" was critically acclaimed, with most praise going to Goldblum's performance and the special effects. Despite being a gory remake of a classic made by a controversial, non-mainstream director, the film was a commercial success, the biggest of Cronenberg's career, and was the top-grossing film in the United States for two weeks, earning a total domestic gross of $40,456,565. Audiences reacted strongly to the graphic creature effects and the tragic love story, and the film received much attention at the time of its release. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Cronenberg was surprised when "The Fly" was seen by some critics as a cultural metaphor for AIDS, since he originally intended the film to be a more general analogy for disease itself, terminal conditions like cancer and, more specifically, the aging process:


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Film critic Gene Siskel named "The Fly" as the tenth best film of 1986. In 1989, "Premiere" and "American Film" magazines both conducted independent polls of American film critics, directors and other such groups to determine the best films of the 1980s, and "The Fly" appeared on both lists.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: "The Fly" holds a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 65 reviews, with an average rating of 8.40/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "David Cronenberg combines his trademark affinity for gore and horror with strongly developed characters, making "The Fly" a surprisingly affecting tragedy." In 2005, "Time" magazine film critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel included "The Fly" in their list of the All-TIME 100 Greatest Movies. "Time" later named it one of the 25 best horror films. The film was ranked #33 on Bravo's "100 Scariest Movie Moments". Similarly, the Chicago Film Critics Association named "The Fly" the 32nd scariest film ever made. In 2021, "The Daily Star" ranked "The Fly" at the top of its list of greatest short story adaptations, praising the film for "exhibit[ing] how greater a short story can evolve, and very much become its own detached, barely recognisable thing."


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: "The Fly" was nominated for the awards in the chart below. Many genre fans and film critics at the time thought that Jeff Goldblum's performance would receive a Best Actor Oscar nomination, but this did not happen. Gene Siskel subsequently stated that Goldblum most likely "got stiffed" out of a nomination because the older Academy voters generally do not honor horror films.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: In 2008, the American Film Institute distributed ballots to 1,500 directors, critics and other people associated with the film industry in order to determine the top ten American films in ten different genre categories. Cronenberg's version of "The Fly" was nominated under the science fiction category, although it did not make the top ten. It was also nominated for AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills and AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions and Veronica's warning to Tawny in the film—"Be afraid. Be very afraid."—was nominated for AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: The quote "Be afraid. Be very afraid." was also used as the film's marketing tagline, and this became so ingrained in popular culture (as it—and variants—have appeared in countless films and TV series) that a large number of people who are familiar with the phrase are unaware that it originated in "The Fly".


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: On October 10, 2020, the film was referenced in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch regarding the 2020 vice presidential debate. Jim Carrey provided an impression of Jeff Goldblum.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Heavy metal band Ice Nine Kills released "F.L.Y" as part of their 2021 album "". The song is inspired by the 1986 film.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Whereas the 1958 original was followed by two sequels, Cronenberg has said that the stories in his films have definitive beginnings and endings, and he has never considered making a sequel to one of his own films, although others have made sequels to Cronenberg films, including "Scanners" (1981).


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: "The Fly II" (1989) was directed by Chris Walas, the man behind the makeup and creature effects of both films and "Gremlins". It is a direct continuation of "The Fly". It features Veronica Quaife giving birth to Brundle's mutant son before dying, and it focuses on the Bartok company's attempts to get the Telepods working again.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: David Cronenberg was not involved with the project. The only actor to return for the sequel was John Getz as an embittered Stathis Borans. Veronica Quaife appears briefly in the film. She is played by Saffron Henderson, since Geena Davis declined to reprise the role. Jeff Goldblum appears in archival footage of Seth Brundle in two scenes, including the post-teleportation interview segment that was deleted from the first film.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: An early treatment for a sequel, written by Tim Lucas, involved Veronica Quaife dealing with the evils of the Bartok company. Brundle's consciousness had somehow survived within the Telepod computer, and the Bartok scientists had enslaved him and were using him to develop the system for cloning purposes. Brundle becomes able to communicate with Veronica through the computer, and he eventually takes control of the Bartok complex's security systems to gruesomely attack the villains. Eventually, Veronica frees Brundle by conspiring with him to reintegrate a non-contaminated version of his original body. Cronenberg endorsed this concept at the time. Geena Davis was open to doing a sequel (and only pulled out of "The Fly II" because her character was to be killed in the opening scene), while Goldblum was not (although he determined a cameo appearance was acceptable), and this treatment reflects that. However, a later treatment written by Jim and Ken Wheat was used as the basis for the final script, written by Frank Darabont. Mick Garris also wrote a treatment, with elements incorporated into the final film.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Beginning in March 2015 IDW Publishing released "The Fly: Outbreak", a five-issue comic book miniseries written by Brandon Seifert. The story is a direct sequel to the events of "The Fly II", and features Seth Brundle's son, Martin, inadvertently causing a transgenic outbreak while attempting to cure Anton Bartok, to whom he'd previously transferred his mutant genes at the end of "The Fly II".


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: In the 1990s, Geena Davis was reportedly involved with an alternate sequel to "The Fly", to be directed by her then-husband, Renny Harlin, titled "Flies". The script by Richard Jefferies was said to feature a story in which Veronica gives birth to twin boys, and she survives the ordeal.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: In 2003, it was announced that a second remake of "The Fly" was being developed, to be directed by Todd Lincoln, produced by Fox Searchlight Pictures, and released in 2006, but this did not happen.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: In 2009, it was rumored that David Cronenberg himself was preparing to direct a second remake of "The Fly", but it was not until 2011 that the director addressed the rumors. Cronenberg stated that he had written not a remake, but rather a "sort of" sequel script to his 1986 version, and would film it if 20th Century Fox gave the project the go-ahead:


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: In a late 2012 interview, Cronenberg provided additional details on why the project had stalled, citing


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: Despite Cronenberg's prior assertions that he does not make sequels to his films, he returned to "The Fly" for the opera "The Fly" in 2008, and his proposed sequel film project would mark a second return to the material, as well as his first sequel to one of his previous movies. However, the film is not moving forward.


title: The Fly (1986 film)

text: On June 15, 2018, Jeff Goldblum said he would be interested in doing a sequel only if Cronenberg was involved even though his character died. “I don’t think my character would be involved because of course I got tragically mutated with the fly and then the machine, oh boy. But maybe I show up as a grandchild of the original Seth Brundle, or Seth Brundle had a brother. Had a brother that emerges in some ways! Who knows, I don’t know but David Cronenberg was a thrill to work with. Boy, if he was involved I’d like to work with him again, I’ll tell you that.”


title: Archaea

text: Archaea ( ; singular archaeon ) is a domain of single-celled organisms. These microorganisms lack cell nuclei and are therefore prokaryotes. Archaea were initially classified as bacteria, receiving the name archaebacteria (in the Archaebacteria kingdom), but this term has fallen out of use.


title: Archaea

text: Archaeal cells have unique properties separating them from the other two domains, Bacteria and Eukaryota. Archaea are further divided into multiple recognized phyla. Classification is difficult because most have not been isolated in a laboratory and have been detected only by their gene sequences in environmental samples.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea and bacteria are generally similar in size and shape, although a few archaea have very different shapes, such as the flat, square cells of "Haloquadratum walsbyi". Despite this morphological similarity to bacteria, archaea possess genes and several metabolic pathways that are more closely related to those of eukaryotes, notably for the enzymes involved in transcription and translation. Other aspects of archaeal biochemistry are unique, such as their reliance on ether lipids in their cell membranes, including archaeols. Archaea use more diverse energy sources than eukaryotes, ranging from organic compounds such as sugars, to ammonia, metal ions or even hydrogen gas. The salt-tolerant Haloarchaea use sunlight as an energy source, and other species of archaea fix carbon (autotrophy), but unlike plants and cyanobacteria, no known species of archaea does both. Archaea reproduce asexually by binary fission, fragmentation, or budding; unlike bacteria, no known species of Archaea form endospores.


title: Archaea

text: The first observed archaea were extremophiles, living in extreme environments such as hot springs and salt lakes with no other organisms. Improved molecular detection tools led to the discovery of archaea in almost every habitat, including soil, oceans, and marshlands. Archaea are particularly numerous in the oceans, and the archaea in plankton may be one of the most abundant groups of organisms on the planet.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea are a major part of Earth's life. They are part of the microbiota of all organisms. In the human microbiome, they are important in the gut, mouth, and on the skin. Their morphological, metabolic, and geographical diversity permits them to play multiple ecological roles: carbon fixation; nitrogen cycling; organic compound turnover; and maintaining microbial symbiotic and syntrophic communities, for example.


title: Archaea

text: No clear examples of archaeal pathogens or parasites are known. Instead they are often mutualists or commensals, such as the methanogens (methane-producing strains) that inhabit the gastrointestinal tract in humans and ruminants, where their vast numbers facilitate digestion. Methanogens are also used in biogas production and sewage treatment, and biotechnology exploits enzymes from extremophile archaea that can endure high temperatures and organic solvents.


title: Archaea

text: For much of the 20th century, prokaryotes were regarded as a single group of organisms and classified based on their biochemistry, morphology and metabolism. Microbiologists tried to classify microorganisms based on the structures of their cell walls, their shapes, and the substances they consume. In 1965, Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling instead proposed using the sequences of the genes in different prokaryotes to work out how they are related to each other. This phylogenetic approach is the main method used today.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea – at that time only the methanogens were known – were first classified separately from bacteria in 1977 by Carl Woese and George E. Fox based on their ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes. They called these groups the "Urkingdoms" of Archaebacteria and Eubacteria, though other researchers treated them as kingdoms or subkingdoms. Woese and Fox gave the first evidence for Archaebacteria as a separate "line of descent": 1. lack of peptidoglycan in their cell walls, 2. two unusual coenzymes, 3. results of 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing. To emphasize this difference, Woese, Otto Kandler and Mark Wheelis later proposed reclassifying organisms into three natural domains known as the three-domain system: the Eukarya, the Bacteria and the Archaea, in what is now known as the Woesian Revolution.


title: Archaea

text: The word "archaea" comes from the Ancient Greek , meaning "ancient things", as the first representatives of the domain Archaea were methanogens and it was assumed that their metabolism reflected Earth's primitive atmosphere and the organisms' antiquity, but as new habitats were studied, more organisms were discovered. Extreme halophilic and hyperthermophilic microbes were also included in Archaea. For a long time, archaea were seen as extremophiles that exist only in extreme habitats such as hot springs and salt lakes, but by the end of the 20th century, archaea had been identified in non-extreme environments as well. Today, they are known to be a large and diverse group of organisms abundantly distributed throughout nature. This new appreciation of the importance and ubiquity of archaea came from using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to detect prokaryotes from environmental samples (such as water or soil) by multiplying their ribosomal genes. This allows the detection and identification of organisms that have not been cultured in the laboratory.


title: Archaea

text: The classification of archaea, and of prokaryotes in general, is a rapidly moving and contentious field. Current classification systems aim to organize archaea into groups of organisms that share structural features and common ancestors. These classifications rely heavily on the use of the sequence of ribosomal RNA genes to reveal relationships among organisms (molecular phylogenetics). Most of the culturable and well-investigated species of archaea are members of two main phyla, the "Euryarchaeota" and the Thermoproteota (formerly Crenarchaeota). Other groups have been tentatively created, like the peculiar species "Nanoarchaeum equitans", which was discovered in 2003 and has been given its own phylum, the "Nanoarchaeota". A new phylum "Korarchaeota" has also been proposed. It contains a small group of unusual thermophilic species that shares features of both of the main phyla, but is most closely related to the Thermoproteota. Other recently detected species of archaea are only distantly related to any of these groups, such as the Archaeal Richmond Mine acidophilic nanoorganisms (ARMAN, comprising Micrarchaeota and Parvarchaeota), which were discovered in 2006 and are some of the smallest organisms known.


title: Archaea

text: A superphylum – TACK – which includes the Thaumarchaeota (now Nitrososphaerota), "Aigarchaeota", Crenarchaeota (now Thermoproteota), and "Korarchaeota" was proposed in 2011 to be related to the origin of eukaryotes. In 2017, the newly discovered and newly named Asgard superphylum was proposed to be more closely related to the original eukaryote and a sister group to TACK.


title: Archaea

text: In 2013 the superphylum DPANN was proposed to group "Nanoarchaeota", "Nanohaloarchaeota", Archaeal Richmond Mine acidophilic nanoorganisms (ARMAN, comprising "Micrarchaeota" and "Parvarchaeota"), and other similar archaea. This archaeal superphylum encompasses at least 10 different lineages and includes organisms with extremely small cell and genome sizes and limited metabolic capabilities. Therefore, many members of DPANN may be obligately dependent on symbiotic interactions with other organisms and may even include novel parasites. However, in other phylogenetic analyses it was found that DPANN does not form a monophyletic group and that it is caused by the long branch attraction (LBA), suggesting that all these lineages belong to "Euryarchaeota".


title: Archaea

text: According to Tom A. Williams "et al." (2017), Castelle & Banfield (2018) and GTDB release 07-RS207 (8th April 2022):


title: Archaea

text: The classification of archaea into species is also controversial. Biology defines a species as a group of related organisms. The familiar exclusive breeding criterion (organisms that can breed with each other but not with others) is of no help since archaea only reproduce asexually.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea show high levels of horizontal gene transfer between lineages. Some researchers suggest that individuals can be grouped into species-like populations given highly similar genomes and infrequent gene transfer to/from cells with less-related genomes, as in the genus "Ferroplasma". On the other hand, studies in "Halorubrum" found significant genetic transfer to/from less-related populations, limiting the criterion's applicability. Some researchers question whether such species designations have practical meaning.


title: Archaea

text: Current knowledge on genetic diversity is fragmentary and the total number of archaeal species cannot be estimated with any accuracy. Estimates of the number of phyla range from 18 to 23, of which only 8 have representatives that have been cultured and studied directly. Many of these hypothesized groups are known from a single rRNA sequence, indicating that the diversity among these organisms remains obscure. The Bacteria also include many uncultured microbes with similar implications for characterization.


title: Archaea

text: The following phyla have been proposed, but have not been validly published according to the Bacteriological Code (including those that have "candidatus" status):


title: Archaea

text: The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years. Scientific evidence suggests that life began on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago. The earliest evidence for life on Earth is graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7-billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48-billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia. In 2015, possible remains of biotic matter were found in 4.1-billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia.


title: Archaea

text: Although probable prokaryotic cell fossils date to almost 3.5 billion years ago, most prokaryotes do not have distinctive morphologies, and fossil shapes cannot be used to identify them as archaea. Instead, chemical fossils of unique lipids are more informative because such compounds do not occur in other organisms. Some publications suggest that archaeal or eukaryotic lipid remains are present in shales dating from 2.7 billion years ago, though such data have since been questioned. These lipids have also been detected in even older rocks from west Greenland. The oldest such traces come from the Isua district, which includes Earth's oldest known sediments, formed 3.8 billion years ago. The archaeal lineage may be the most ancient that exists on Earth.


title: Archaea

text: Woese argued that the Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes represent separate lines of descent that diverged early on from an ancestral colony of organisms. One possibility is that this occurred before the evolution of cells, when the lack of a typical cell membrane allowed unrestricted lateral gene transfer, and that the common ancestors of the three domains arose by fixation of specific subsets of genes. It is possible that the last common ancestor of bacteria and archaea was a thermophile, which raises the possibility that lower temperatures are "extreme environments" for archaea, and organisms that live in cooler environments appeared only later. Since archaea and bacteria are no more related to each other than they are to eukaryotes, the term "prokaryote" may suggest a false similarity between them. However, structural and functional similarities between lineages often occur because of shared ancestral traits or evolutionary convergence. These similarities are known as a "grade", and prokaryotes are best thought of as a grade of life, characterized by such features as an absence of membrane-bound organelles.


title: Archaea

text: The following table compares some major characteristics of the three domains, to illustrate their similarities and differences.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea were split off as a third domain because of the large differences in their ribosomal RNA structure. The particular molecule 16S rRNA is key to the production of proteins in all organisms. Because this function is so central to life, organisms with mutations in their 16S rRNA are unlikely to survive, leading to great (but not absolute) stability in the structure of this polynucleotide over generations. 16S rRNA is large enough to show organism-specific variations, but still small enough to be compared quickly. In 1977, Carl Woese, a microbiologist studying the genetic sequences of organisms, developed a new comparison method that involved splitting the RNA into fragments that could be sorted and compared with other fragments from other organisms. The more similar the patterns between species, the more closely they are related.


title: Archaea

text: Woese used his new rRNA comparison method to categorize and contrast different organisms. He compared a variety of species and happened upon a group of methanogens with rRNA vastly different from any known prokaryotes or eukaryotes. These methanogens were much more similar to each other than to other organisms, leading Woese to propose the new domain of Archaea. His experiments showed that the archaea were genetically more similar to eukaryotes than prokaryotes, even though they were more similar to prokaryotes in structure. This led to the conclusion that Archaea and Eukarya shared a common ancestor more recent than Eukarya and Bacteria. The development of the nucleus occurred after the split between Bacteria and this common ancestor.


title: Archaea

text: One property unique to archaea is the abundant use of ether-linked lipids in their cell membranes. Ether linkages are more chemically stable than the ester linkages found in bacteria and eukarya, which may be a contributing factor to the ability of many archaea to survive in extreme environments that place heavy stress on cell membranes, such as extreme heat and salinity. Comparative analysis of archaeal genomes has also identified several molecular conserved signature indels and signature proteins uniquely present in either all archaea or different main groups within archaea. Another unique feature of archaea, found in no other organisms, is methanogenesis (the metabolic production of methane). Methanogenic archaea play a pivotal role in ecosystems with organisms that derive energy from oxidation of methane, many of which are bacteria, as they are often a major source of methane in such environments and can play a role as primary producers. Methanogens also play a critical role in the carbon cycle, breaking down organic carbon into methane, which is also a major greenhouse gas.


title: Archaea

text: This difference in biochemical structure of Bacteria and Archaea has been explained by researchers that they originated at deep sea alkaline hydrothermal vents, where they independently developed lipid biosynthesis and cell wall biochemistry during their transition to Archaea and Bacteria. It has been suggested that the last universal common ancestor was a not free-living organism. However this view has been challenged by other researchers and is currently in dispute.


title: Archaea

text: The relationships among the three domains are of central importance for understanding the origin of life. Most of the metabolic pathways, which are the object of the majority of an organism's genes, are common between Archaea and Bacteria, while most genes involved in genome expression are common between Archaea and Eukarya. Within prokaryotes, archaeal cell structure is most similar to that of gram-positive bacteria, largely because both have a single lipid bilayer and usually contain a thick sacculus (exoskeleton) of varying chemical composition. In some phylogenetic trees based upon different gene/protein sequences of prokaryotic homologs, the archaeal homologs are more closely related to those of gram-positive bacteria. Archaea and gram-positive bacteria also share conserved indels in a number of important proteins, such as Hsp70 and glutamine synthetase I; but the phylogeny of these genes was interpreted to reveal interdomain gene transfer, and might not reflect the organismal relationship(s).


title: Archaea

text: It has been proposed that the archaea evolved from gram-positive bacteria in response to antibiotic selection pressure. This is suggested by the observation that archaea are resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics that are produced primarily by gram-positive bacteria, and that these antibiotics act primarily on the genes that distinguish archaea from bacteria. The proposal is that the selective pressure towards resistance generated by the gram-positive antibiotics was eventually sufficient to cause extensive changes in many of the antibiotics' target genes, and that these strains represented the common ancestors of present-day Archaea. The evolution of Archaea in response to antibiotic selection, or any other competitive selective pressure, could also explain their adaptation to extreme environments (such as high temperature or acidity) as the result of a search for unoccupied niches to escape from antibiotic-producing organisms; Cavalier-Smith has made a similar suggestion. This proposal is also supported by other work investigating protein structural relationships and studies that suggest that gram-positive bacteria may constitute the earliest branching lineages within the prokaryotes.


title: Archaea

text: The evolutionary relationship between archaea and eukaryotes remains unclear. Aside from the similarities in cell structure and function that are discussed below, many genetic trees group the two.


title: Archaea

text: Complicating factors include claims that the relationship between eukaryotes and the archaeal phylum Thermoproteota is closer than the relationship between the "Euryarchaeota" and the phylum Thermoproteota and the presence of archaea-like genes in certain bacteria, such as "Thermotoga maritima", from horizontal gene transfer. The standard hypothesis states that the ancestor of the eukaryotes diverged early from the Archaea, and that eukaryotes arose through fusion of an archaean and eubacterium, which became the nucleus and cytoplasm; this hypothesis explains the genetic similarities between the groups. The eocyte hypothesis instead posits that Eukaryota emerged relatively late from the Archaea.


title: Archaea

text: A lineage of archaea discovered in 2015, "Lokiarchaeum" (of proposed new Phylum "Lokiarchaeota"), named for a hydrothermal vent called Loki's Castle in the Arctic Ocean, was found to be the most closely related to eukaryotes known at that time. It has been called a transitional organism between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.


title: Archaea

text: Several sister phyla of "Lokiarchaeota" have since been found ("Thorarchaeota", "Odinarchaeota", "Heimdallarchaeota"), all together comprising a newly proposed supergroup Asgard, which may appear as a sister taxon to Proteoarchaeota.


title: Archaea

text: Details of the relation of Asgard members and eukaryotes are still under consideration, although, in January 2020, scientists reported that "Candidatus Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum", a type of Asgard archaea, may be a possible link between simple prokaryotic and complex eukaryotic microorganisms about two billion years ago.


title: Archaea

text: Individual archaea range from 0.1 micrometers (μm) to over 15 μm in diameter, and occur in various shapes, commonly as spheres, rods, spirals or plates. Other morphologies in the Thermoproteota include irregularly shaped lobed cells in "Sulfolobus", needle-like filaments that are less than half a micrometer in diameter in "Thermofilum", and almost perfectly rectangular rods in "Thermoproteus" and "Pyrobaculum". Archaea in the genus "Haloquadratum" such as "Haloquadratum walsbyi" are flat, square specimens that live in hypersaline pools. These unusual shapes are probably maintained by both their cell walls and a prokaryotic cytoskeleton. Proteins related to the cytoskeleton components of other organisms exist in archaea, and filaments form within their cells, but in contrast with other organisms, these cellular structures are poorly understood. In "Thermoplasma" and "Ferroplasma" the lack of a cell wall means that the cells have irregular shapes, and can resemble amoebae.


title: Archaea

text: Some species form aggregates or filaments of cells up to 200 μm long. These organisms can be prominent in biofilms. Notably, aggregates of "Thermococcus coalescens" cells fuse together in culture, forming single giant cells. Archaea in the genus "Pyrodictium" produce an elaborate multicell colony involving arrays of long, thin hollow tubes called "cannulae" that stick out from the cells' surfaces and connect them into a dense bush-like agglomeration. The function of these cannulae is not settled, but they may allow communication or nutrient exchange with neighbors. Multi-species colonies exist, such as the "string-of-pearls" community that was discovered in 2001 in a German swamp. Round whitish colonies of a novel Euryarchaeota species are spaced along thin filaments that can range up to long; these filaments are made of a particular bacteria species.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea and bacteria have generally similar cell structure, but cell composition and organization set the archaea apart. Like bacteria, archaea lack interior membranes and organelles. Like bacteria, the cell membranes of archaea are usually bounded by a cell wall and they swim using one or more flagella. Structurally, archaea are most similar to gram-positive bacteria. Most have a single plasma membrane and cell wall, and lack a periplasmic space; the exception to this general rule is "Ignicoccus", which possess a particularly large periplasm that contains membrane-bound vesicles and is enclosed by an outer membrane.


title: Archaea

text: Most archaea (but not "Thermoplasma" and "Ferroplasma") possess a cell wall. In most archaea the wall is assembled from surface-layer proteins, which form an S-layer. An S-layer is a rigid array of protein molecules that cover the outside of the cell (like chain mail). This layer provides both chemical and physical protection, and can prevent macromolecules from contacting the cell membrane. Unlike bacteria, archaea lack peptidoglycan in their cell walls. Methanobacteriales do have cell walls containing pseudopeptidoglycan, which resembles eubacterial peptidoglycan in morphology, function, and physical structure, but pseudopeptidoglycan is distinct in chemical structure; it lacks D-amino acids and N-acetylmuramic acid, substituting the latter with N-Acetyltalosaminuronic acid.


title: Archaea

text: Archaeal flagella are known as archaella, that operate like bacterial flagella – their long stalks are driven by rotatory motors at the base. These motors are powered by a proton gradient across the membrane, but archaella are notably different in composition and development. The two types of flagella evolved from different ancestors. The bacterial flagellum shares a common ancestor with the type III secretion system, while archaeal flagella appear to have evolved from bacterial type IV pili. In contrast with the bacterial flagellum, which is hollow and assembled by subunits moving up the central pore to the tip of the flagella, archaeal flagella are synthesized by adding subunits at the base.


title: Archaea

text: Archaeal membranes are made of molecules that are distinctly different from those in all other life forms, showing that archaea are related only distantly to bacteria and eukaryotes. In all organisms, cell membranes are made of molecules known as phospholipids. These molecules possess both a polar part that dissolves in water (the phosphate "head"), and a "greasy" non-polar part that does not (the lipid tail). These dissimilar parts are connected by a glycerol moiety. In water, phospholipids cluster, with the heads facing the water and the tails facing away from it. The major structure in cell membranes is a double layer of these phospholipids, which is called a lipid bilayer.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea exhibit a great variety of chemical reactions in their metabolism and use many sources of energy. These reactions are classified into nutritional groups, depending on energy and carbon sources. Some archaea obtain energy from inorganic compounds such as sulfur or ammonia (they are chemotrophs). These include nitrifiers, methanogens and anaerobic methane oxidisers. In these reactions one compound passes electrons to another (in a redox reaction), releasing energy to fuel the cell's activities. One compound acts as an electron donor and one as an electron acceptor. The energy released is used to generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP) through chemiosmosis, the same basic process that happens in the mitochondrion of eukaryotic cells.


title: Archaea

text: Other groups of archaea use sunlight as a source of energy (they are phototrophs), but oxygen–generating photosynthesis does not occur in any of these organisms. Many basic metabolic pathways are shared among all forms of life; for example, archaea use a modified form of glycolysis (the Entner–Doudoroff pathway) and either a complete or partial citric acid cycle. These similarities to other organisms probably reflect both early origins in the history of life and their high level of efficiency.


title: Archaea

text: Some Euryarchaeota are methanogens (archaea that produce methane as a result of metabolism) living in anaerobic environments, such as swamps. This form of metabolism evolved early, and it is even possible that the first free-living organism was a methanogen. A common reaction involves the use of carbon dioxide as an electron acceptor to oxidize hydrogen. Methanogenesis involves a range of coenzymes that are unique to these archaea, such as coenzyme M and methanofuran. Other organic compounds such as alcohols, acetic acid or formic acid are used as alternative electron acceptors by methanogens. These reactions are common in gut-dwelling archaea. Acetic acid is also broken down into methane and carbon dioxide directly, by "acetotrophic" archaea. These acetotrophs are archaea in the order Methanosarcinales, and are a major part of the communities of microorganisms that produce biogas.


title: Archaea

text: Other archaea use in the atmosphere as a source of carbon, in a process called carbon fixation (they are autotrophs). This process involves either a highly modified form of the Calvin cycle or another metabolic pathway called the 3-hydroxypropionate/ 4-hydroxybutyrate cycle. The Thermoproteota also use the reverse Krebs cycle while the "Euryarchaeota" also use the reductive acetyl-CoA pathway. Carbon fixation is powered by inorganic energy sources. No known archaea carry out photosynthesis (Halobacterium is the only known phototroph archeon but it uses an alternative process to photosynthesis). Archaeal energy sources are extremely diverse, and range from the oxidation of ammonia by the Nitrosopumilales to the oxidation of hydrogen sulfide or elemental sulfur by species of "Sulfolobus", using either oxygen or metal ions as electron acceptors.


title: Archaea

text: Phototrophic archaea use light to produce chemical energy in the form of ATP. In the Halobacteria, light-activated ion pumps like bacteriorhodopsin and halorhodopsin generate ion gradients by pumping ions out of and into the cell across the plasma membrane. The energy stored in these electrochemical gradients is then converted into ATP by ATP synthase. This process is a form of photophosphorylation. The ability of these light-driven pumps to move ions across membranes depends on light-driven changes in the structure of a retinol cofactor buried in the center of the protein.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea usually have a single circular chromosome, with as many as 5,751,492 base pairs in "Methanosarcina acetivorans", the largest known archaeal genome. The tiny 490,885 base-pair genome of "Nanoarchaeum equitans" is one-tenth of this size and the smallest archaeal genome known; it is estimated to contain only 537 protein-encoding genes. Smaller independent pieces of DNA, called "plasmids", are also found in archaea. Plasmids may be transferred between cells by physical contact, in a process that may be similar to bacterial conjugation.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea are genetically distinct from bacteria and eukaryotes, with up to 15% of the proteins encoded by any one archaeal genome being unique to the domain, although most of these unique genes have no known function. Of the remainder of the unique proteins that have an identified function, most belong to the Euryarchaeota and are involved in methanogenesis. The proteins that archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes share form a common core of cell function, relating mostly to transcription, translation, and nucleotide metabolism. Other characteristic archaeal features are the organization of genes of related function – such as enzymes that catalyze steps in the same metabolic pathway into novel operons, and large differences in tRNA genes and their aminoacyl tRNA synthetases.


title: Archaea

text: Transcription in archaea more closely resembles eukaryotic than bacterial transcription, with the archaeal RNA polymerase being very close to its equivalent in eukaryotes, while archaeal translation shows signs of both bacterial and eukaryotic equivalents. Although archaea have only one type of RNA polymerase, its structure and function in transcription seems to be close to that of the eukaryotic RNA polymerase II, with similar protein assemblies (the general transcription factors) directing the binding of the RNA polymerase to a gene's promoter, but other archaeal transcription factors are closer to those found in bacteria. Post-transcriptional modification is simpler than in eukaryotes, since most archaeal genes lack introns, although there are many introns in their transfer RNA and ribosomal RNA genes, and introns may occur in a few protein-encoding genes.


title: Archaea

text: "Haloferax volcanii", an extreme halophilic archaeon, forms cytoplasmic bridges between cells that appear to be used for transfer of DNA from one cell to another in either direction.


title: Archaea

text: When the hyperthermophilic archaea "Sulfolobus solfataricus" and "Sulfolobus acidocaldarius" are exposed to DNA-damaging UV irradiation or to the agents bleomycin or mitomycin C, species-specific cellular aggregation is induced. Aggregation in "S. solfataricus" could not be induced by other physical stressors, such as pH or temperature shift, suggesting that aggregation is induced specifically by DNA damage. Ajon et al. showed that UV-induced cellular aggregation mediates chromosomal marker exchange with high frequency in "S. acidocaldarius". Recombination rates exceeded those of uninduced cultures by up to three orders of magnitude. Frols et al. and Ajon et al. hypothesized that cellular aggregation enhances species-specific DNA transfer between "Sulfolobus" cells in order to provide increased repair of damaged DNA by means of homologous recombination. This response may be a primitive form of sexual interaction similar to the more well-studied bacterial transformation systems that are also associated with species-specific DNA transfer between cells leading to homologous recombinational repair of DNA damage.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea are the target of a number of viruses in a diverse virosphere distinct from bacterial and eukaryotic viruses. They have been organized into 15-18 DNA-based families so far, but multiple species remain un-isolated and await classification. These families can be informally divided into two groups: archaea-specific and cosmopolitan. Archaeal-specific viruses target only archaean species and currently include 12 families. Numerous unique, previously unidentified viral structures have been observed in this group, including: bottle-shaped, spindle-shaped, coil-shaped, and droplet-shaped viruses. While the reproductive cycles and genomic mechanisms of archaea-specific species may be similar to other viruses, they bear unique characteristics that were specifically developed due to the morphology of host cells they infect. Their virus release mechanisms differ from that of other phages. Bacteriophages generally undergo either lytic pathways, lysogenic pathways, or (rarely) a mix of the two. Most archaea-specific viral strains maintain a stable, somewhat lysogenic, relationship with their hosts – appearing as a chronic infection. This involves the gradual, and continuous, production and release of virions without killing the host cell. Prangishyili (2013) noted that it has been hypothesized that tailed archaeal phages originated from bacteriophages capable of infecting haloarchaeal species. If the hypothesis is correct, it can be concluded that other double-stranded DNA viruses that make up the rest of the archaea-specific group are their own unique group in the global viral community. Krupovic et al. (2018) states that the high levels of horizontal gene transfer, rapid mutation rates in viral genomes, and lack of universal gene sequences have led researchers to perceive the evolutionary pathway of archaeal viruses as a network. The lack of similarities among phylogenetic markers in this network and the global virosphere, as well as external linkages to non-viral elements, may suggest that some species of archaea specific viruses evolved from non-viral mobile genetic elements (MGE).


title: Archaea

text: These viruses have been studied in most detail in thermophilics, particularly the orders Sulfolobales and Thermoproteales. Two groups of single-stranded DNA viruses that infect archaea have been recently isolated. One group is exemplified by the "Halorubrum pleomorphic virus 1" ("Pleolipoviridae") infecting halophilic archaea, and the other one by the "Aeropyrum coil-shaped virus" ("Spiraviridae") infecting a hyperthermophilic (optimal growth at 90–95 °C) host. Notably, the latter virus has the largest currently reported ssDNA genome. Defenses against these viruses may involve RNA interference from repetitive DNA sequences that are related to the genes of the viruses.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea reproduce asexually by binary or multiple fission, fragmentation, or budding; mitosis and meiosis do not occur, so if a species of archaea exists in more than one form, all have the same genetic material. Cell division is controlled in a cell cycle; after the cell's chromosome is replicated and the two daughter chromosomes separate, the cell divides. In the genus "Sulfolobus", the cycle has characteristics that are similar to both bacterial and eukaryotic systems. The chromosomes replicate from multiple starting points (origins of replication) using DNA polymerases that resemble the equivalent eukaryotic enzymes.


title: Archaea

text: In Euryarchaeota the cell division protein FtsZ, which forms a contracting ring around the cell, and the components of the septum that is constructed across the center of the cell, are similar to their bacterial equivalents. In cren- and thaumarchaea, the cell division machinery Cdv fulfills a similar role. This machinery is related to the eukaryotic ESCRT-III machinery which, while best known for its role in cell sorting, also has been seen to fulfill a role in separation between divided cell, suggesting an ancestral role in cell division.


title: Archaea

text: Both bacteria and eukaryotes, but not archaea, make spores. Some species of Haloarchaea undergo phenotypic switching and grow as several different cell types, including thick-walled structures that are resistant to osmotic shock and allow the archaea to survive in water at low salt concentrations, but these are not reproductive structures and may instead help them reach new habitats.


title: Archaea

text: Quorum sensing was originally thought to not exist in Archaea, but recent studies have shown evidence of some species being able to perform cross-talk through quorum sensing. Other studies have shown syntrophic interactions between archaea and bacteria during biofilm growth. Although research is limited in archaeal quorum sensing, some studies have uncovered LuxR proteins in archaeal species, displaying similarities with bacteria LuxR, and ultimately allowing for the detection of small molecules that are used in high density communication. Similarly to bacteria, Archaea LuxR solos have shown to bind to AHLs (lactones) and non-AHLs ligans, which is a large part in performing intraspecies, interspecies, and interkingdom communication through quorum sensing.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea exist in a broad range of habitats, and are now recognized as a major part of global ecosystems, and may represent about 20% of microbial cells in the oceans. However, the first-discovered archaeans were extremophiles. Indeed, some archaea survive high temperatures, often above , as found in geysers, black smokers, and oil wells. Other common habitats include very cold habitats and highly saline, acidic, or alkaline water, but archaea include mesophiles that grow in mild conditions, in swamps and marshland, sewage, the oceans, the intestinal tract of animals, and soils. Similar to PGPR, Archaea are now considered as a source of plant growth promotion as well.


title: Archaea

text: Extremophile archaea are members of four main physiological groups. These are the halophiles, thermophiles, alkaliphiles, and acidophiles. These groups are not comprehensive or phylum-specific, nor are they mutually exclusive, since some archaea belong to several groups. Nonetheless, they are a useful starting point for classification.


title: Archaea

text: Halophiles, including the genus "Halobacterium", live in extremely saline environments such as salt lakes and outnumber their bacterial counterparts at salinities greater than 20–25%. Thermophiles grow best at temperatures above , in places such as hot springs; "hyperthermophilic" archaea grow optimally at temperatures greater than . The archaeal "Methanopyrus kandleri" Strain 116 can even reproduce at , the highest recorded temperature of any organism.


title: Archaea

text: Other archaea exist in very acidic or alkaline conditions. For example, one of the most extreme archaean acidophiles is "Picrophilus torridus", which grows at pH 0, which is equivalent to thriving in 1.2 molar sulfuric acid.


title: Archaea

text: This resistance to extreme environments has made archaea the focus of speculation about the possible properties of extraterrestrial life. Some extremophile habitats are not dissimilar to those on Mars, leading to the suggestion that viable microbes could be transferred between planets in meteorites.


title: Archaea

text: Recently, several studies have shown that archaea exist not only in mesophilic and thermophilic environments but are also present, sometimes in high numbers, at low temperatures as well. For example, archaea are common in cold oceanic environments such as polar seas. Even more significant are the large numbers of archaea found throughout the world's oceans in non-extreme habitats among the plankton community (as part of the picoplankton). Although these archaea can be present in extremely high numbers (up to 40% of the microbial biomass), almost none of these species have been isolated and studied in pure culture. Consequently, our understanding of the role of archaea in ocean ecology is rudimentary, so their full influence on global biogeochemical cycles remains largely unexplored. Some marine Thermoproteota are capable of nitrification, suggesting these organisms may affect the oceanic nitrogen cycle, although these oceanic Thermoproteota may also use other sources of energy.


title: Archaea

text: Vast numbers of archaea are also found in the sediments that cover the sea floor, with these organisms making up the majority of living cells at depths over 1 meter below the ocean bottom. It has been demonstrated that in all oceanic surface sediments (from 1000- to 10,000-m water depth), the impact of viral infection is higher on archaea than on bacteria and virus-induced lysis of archaea accounts for up to one-third of the total microbial biomass killed, resulting in the release of ~0.3 to 0.5 gigatons of carbon per year globally.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea recycle elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur through their various habitats. Archaea carry out many steps in the nitrogen cycle. This includes both reactions that remove nitrogen from ecosystems (such as nitrate-based respiration and denitrification) as well as processes that introduce nitrogen (such as nitrate assimilation and nitrogen fixation).


title: Archaea

text: Researchers recently discovered archaeal involvement in ammonia oxidation reactions. These reactions are particularly important in the oceans. The archaea also appear crucial for ammonia oxidation in soils. They produce nitrite, which other microbes then oxidize to nitrate. Plants and other organisms consume the latter.


title: Archaea

text: In the sulfur cycle, archaea that grow by oxidizing sulfur compounds release this element from rocks, making it available to other organisms, but the archaea that do this, such as "Sulfolobus", produce sulfuric acid as a waste product, and the growth of these organisms in abandoned mines can contribute to acid mine drainage and other environmental damage.


title: Archaea

text: In the carbon cycle, methanogen archaea remove hydrogen and play an important role in the decay of organic matter by the populations of microorganisms that act as decomposers in anaerobic ecosystems, such as sediments, marshes, and sewage-treatment works.


title: Archaea

text: The well-characterized interactions between archaea and other organisms are either mutual or commensal. There are no clear examples of known archaeal pathogens or parasites, but some species of methanogens have been suggested to be involved in infections in the mouth, and "Nanoarchaeum equitans" may be a parasite of another species of archaea, since it only survives and reproduces within the cells of the Crenarchaeon "Ignicoccus hospitalis", and appears to offer no benefit to its host.


title: Archaea

text: Mutualism is an interaction between individuals of different species that results in positive (beneficial) effects on per capita reproduction and/or survival of the interacting populations. One well-understood example of mutualism is the interaction between protozoa and methanogenic archaea in the digestive tracts of animals that digest cellulose, such as ruminants and termites. In these anaerobic environments, protozoa break down plant cellulose to obtain energy. This process releases hydrogen as a waste product, but high levels of hydrogen reduce energy production. When methanogens convert hydrogen to methane, protozoa benefit from more energy.


title: Archaea

text: In anaerobic protozoa, such as "Plagiopyla frontata", archaea reside inside the protozoa and consume hydrogen produced in their hydrogenosomes. Archaea also associate with larger organisms. For example, the marine archaean "Cenarchaeum symbiosum" lives within (is an endosymbiont of) the sponge "Axinella mexicana".


title: Archaea

text: Archaea can also be commensals, benefiting from an association without helping or harming the other organism. For example, the methanogen "Methanobrevibacter smithii" is by far the most common archaean in the human flora, making up about one in ten of all the prokaryotes in the human gut. In termites and in humans, these methanogens may in fact be mutualists, interacting with other microbes in the gut to aid digestion. Archaean communities also associate with a range of other organisms, such as on the surface of corals, and in the region of soil that surrounds plant roots (the rhizosphere).


title: Archaea

text: Although Archaea do not have a historical reputation of being pathogens, Archaea are often found with similar genomes to more common pathogen like "E. coli," showing metabolic links and evolutionary history with today's pathogens. Archaea also has inconsistent detection within clinical studies because of the lack of categorization of Archaea into more specific species.


title: Archaea

text: Extremophile archaea, particularly those resistant either to heat or to extremes of acidity and alkalinity, are a source of enzymes that function under these harsh conditions. These enzymes have found many uses. For example, thermostable DNA polymerases, such as the Pfu DNA polymerase from "Pyrococcus furiosus", revolutionized molecular biology by allowing the polymerase chain reaction to be used in research as a simple and rapid technique for cloning DNA. In industry, amylases, galactosidases and pullulanases in other species of "Pyrococcus" that function at over allow food processing at high temperatures, such as the production of low lactose milk and whey. Enzymes from these thermophilic archaea also tend to be very stable in organic solvents, allowing their use in environmentally friendly processes in green chemistry that synthesize organic compounds. This stability makes them easier to use in structural biology. Consequently, the counterparts of bacterial or eukaryotic enzymes from extremophile archaea are often used in structural studies.


title: Archaea

text: In contrast with the range of applications of archaean enzymes, the use of the organisms themselves in biotechnology is less developed. Methanogenic archaea are a vital part of sewage treatment, since they are part of the community of microorganisms that carry out anaerobic digestion and produce biogas. In mineral processing, acidophilic archaea display promise for the extraction of metals from ores, including gold, cobalt and copper.


title: Archaea

text: Archaea host a new class of potentially useful antibiotics. A few of these archaeocins have been characterized, but hundreds more are believed to exist, especially within "Haloarchaea" and "Sulfolobus". These compounds differ in structure from bacterial antibiotics, so they may have novel modes of action. In addition, they may allow the creation of new selectable markers for use in archaeal molecular biology.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author, screenwriter, short-story writer, and director. Ellis was first regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. His novels commonly share recurring characters.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: When Ellis was 21, his first novel, the controversial bestseller "Less than Zero" (1985), was published by Simon & Schuster. His third novel, "American Psycho" (1991), was his most successful. Upon its release the literary establishment widely condemned it as overly violent and misogynistic. Though many petitions to ban the book saw Ellis dropped by Simon & Schuster, the resounding controversy convinced Alfred A. Knopf to release it as a paperback later that year. Ellis's novels have become increasingly metafictional. "Lunar Park" (2005), a pseudo-memoir and ghost story, received positive reviews. "Imperial Bedrooms" (2010), marketed as a sequel to "Less than Zero", continues in this vein. "The Shards" (2023) is a fictionalized memoir of Ellis's final year of high school in 1981 in Los Angeles.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Four of Ellis's works have been made into films. "Less than Zero" was adapted in 1987 as a film of the same name, but the film bore little resemblance to the novel. Mary Harron's adaptation of "American Psycho" was released in 2000. Roger Avary's adaptation of "The Rules of Attraction" was released in 2002. "The Informers", co-written by Ellis and based on his collection of short stories, was released in 2008. Ellis also wrote the screenplay for the 2013 film "The Canyons".


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Ellis was born in Los Angeles in 1964, and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. His father, Robert Martin Ellis, was a property developer, and his mother, Dale Ellis (nee Dennis), was a homemaker. They divorced in 1982. During the initial release of his third novel, "American Psycho," Ellis said that his father was abusive and was the basis of the book's best-known character, Patrick Bateman. Later Ellis claimed the character was not in fact based on his father, but on Ellis himself, saying that all of his work came from a specific place of pain he was going through in his life during the writing of each of his books. Ellis claims that while his family life growing up was somewhat difficult due to the divorce, he mostly had an "idyllic" California childhood.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Ellis was educated at The Buckley School in California; he then attended Bennington College in Vermont, where he originally studied music then gradually gravitated to writing, which had been one of his passions since childhood. There he met and befriended Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem, who both later became published writers.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Bennington College was also where Ellis completed a novel he had been working on for many years. That book, "Less than Zero", was published while Ellis was 21 and still in college, and propelled him to instant fame. Ellis is represented by literary agent Amanda Urban. After the success and controversy of "Less than Zero" in 1985, Ellis became closely associated and good friends with fellow Brat Pack writer Jay McInerney: the two became known as the "toxic twins" for their highly publicized late-night debauchery.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Ellis became a pariah for a time following the release of "American Psycho" (1991), which later became a critical and cult hit, more so after its 2000 movie adaptation. It is now regarded as Ellis's "magnum opus", garnering acknowledgement from a number of academics. "The Informers" (1994) was offered to his publisher during "Glamorama"'s long writing history. Ellis wrote a screenplay for "The Rules of Attraction"s film adaptation, which was not used. He records a fictionalized version of his life story up until this point in the first chapter of "Lunar Park" (2005). After the death of his lover Michael Wade Kaplan, Ellis was spurred to finish "Lunar Park" and inflected it with a new tone of wistfulness. Ellis was approached by young screenwriter Nicholas Jarecki to adapt "The Informers" into a film; the script they co-wrote was cut from 150 to 94 pages and taken from Jarecki to give to Australian director Gregor Jordan, whose light-on-humor vision of the film met with negative reviews when it was released in 2009.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Despite setbacks as a screenwriter, Ellis teamed up with acclaimed director Gus Van Sant in 2009 to adapt the "Vanity Fair" article "The Golden Suicides" into a film of the same name, depicting the paranoid final days and suicides of celebrity artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. The film, as of 2014, has never been made. When Van Sant appeared on "The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast" on February 12, 2014, he stated that he was never attached to the project as a screenwriter or a director, merely a consultant, claiming that the material seemed too tricky for him to properly render on screen. Ellis and Van Sant mentioned that Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling were approached to star as Duncan and Blake, respectively. Ellis confirmed that he and his producing partner Braxton Pope are still working on the project, with Ellis revisiting the screenplay from time to time. As of April 2014, radical filmmaker Gaspar Noé was officially attached to direct if the film went into production, but he proved troublesome to work with due to his erratic behavior.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: In 2010, Ellis released "Imperial Bedrooms", the sequel to his début novel. Ellis wrote it following his return to LA and fictionalizes his work on the film adaptation of "The Informers", from the perspective of Clay. "Publishers Weekly" gave the book a positive review, saying, "Ellis fans will delight in the characters and Ellis's easy hand in manipulating their fates, and though the novel's synchronicity with Zero is sublime, this also works as a stellar stand-alone." Ellis expressed interest in writing the screenplay for the "Fifty Shades of Grey" film adaptation. He discussed casting with his followers, and even mentioned meeting with the film's producers, as well as noting he felt it went well. The job eventually went to Kelly Marcel, Patrick Marber and Mark Bomback. In 2012 Ellis wrote the screenplay for the independent film "The Canyons" and helped raise money for its production. The film was released in 2013 and critically panned, but was a modest financial success, with Lindsay Lohan's performance in the lead role earning some positive reviews.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: When asked in an interview in 2002 whether he was gay, Ellis explained that he did not identify as gay or straight, but was comfortable being thought of as homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual and enjoyed playing with his persona, identifying variously as gay, straight and bisexual to different people over the years. In a 1999 interview, Ellis suggested that his reluctance to definitively label his sexuality was for "artistic reasons", "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read [my books] in a different way. If they knew I was gay, "Psycho" would be read as a different book." In an interview with Robert F. Coleman, Ellis said he had an "indeterminate sexuality", that "any other interviewer out there will get a different answer and it just depends on the mood I am in".


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: In a 2011 interview with James Brown, Ellis again said that his answers to questions about his sexuality have varied and discussed being labelled "bi" by a "Details" interviewer. "I think the last time I slept with a woman was five or six years ago, so the bi thing can only be played out so long", he said. "But I still use it, I still say it." Responding to Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Ellis tweeted, "Not to bum everyone out, but can we get a reality check here? It gets worse." In a 2012 op-ed for "The Daily Beast", while apologizing for a series of controversial tweets, Ellis came out as gay.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: "Lunar Park" was dedicated to Ellis's lover, Michael Wade Kaplan, who died shortly before he finished the book and to Ellis's father, Robert Ellis, who died in 1992. In one interview Ellis described feeling a liberation in the completion of the novel that allowed him to come to terms with unresolved issues about his father. In the "author Q&A" for "Lunar Park" on the Random House website, Ellis comments on his relationship with Robert, and says he feels that his father was a "tough case" who left him damaged. Having grown older and "mellow[ed] out", Ellis describes how his opinion of his father changed since 15 years ago when writing "Glamorama" (in which the central conspiracy concerns the relationship of a father and son). Earlier in his career, Ellis said he based the character Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho" on his father, but in a 2010 interview he claimed to have lied about this explanation. Explaining that "Patrick Bateman was about me," he said, "I didn't want to finally own up to the responsibility of being Patrick Bateman, so I laid it on my father, I laid it on Wall Street." In reality, the book was "about me at the time, and I wrote about all my rage and feelings." To James Brown, he clarified that Bateman was based on "my father a little bit but I was living that lifestyle; my father wasn't in New York the same age as Patrick Bateman, living in the same building, going to the same places that Patrick Bateman was going to."


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Ellis named his first novel and his latest after two Elvis Costello references: "Less than Zero" and "Imperial Bedroom", respectively. Ellis called Bruce Springsteen his "musical hero" in a 2010 interview with "NME".


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Ellis's first novel, "Less than Zero", is a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles written and rewritten over a five-year period from Ellis's second year in high school, earlier drafts being "... more autobiographical and read like teen diaries or journal entries—lots of stuff about the bands I liked, the beach, the Galleria, clubs, driving around, doing drugs, partying", according to Ellis. The novel was praised by critics and sold well (50,000 copies in its first year). He moved back to New York City in 1987 for the publication of his second novel, "The Rules of Attraction"—described by Ellis as "an attempt to write the kind of college novel I had always wanted to read and could never find"—which follows a group of sexually promiscuous college students. Influenced heavily by James Joyce's "Ulysses" and its stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, the book sold fairly well, though Ellis admits he felt he had "fallen off" after the novel failed to match the success of his debut effort, saying in 2012, "I was very obsessive, very protective about that book, perhaps overly so." His most controversial work is the graphically violent "American Psycho" (1991) which Ellis has said "came out of a place of severe alienation and loneliness and self-loathing. I was pursuing a life—you could call it the "Gentlemen's Quarterly" way of living—that I knew was bullshit, and yet I couldn't seem to help it." The book was intended to be published by Simon & Schuster, but they withdrew after external protests from groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and many others due to its alleged misogyny. It was later published by Vintage. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and serial killer, an example of transgressive art. "American Psycho" has achieved considerable cult status.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Ellis's collection of short stories "The Informers" was published in 1994. It contains vignettes of wayward Los Angeles characters ranging from rock stars to vampires, mostly written while Ellis was in college, and so has more in common with the style of "Less than Zero." Ellis has said that the stories in "The Informers" were collected and released only to fulfill a contractual obligation after discovering that it would take far longer to complete his next novel than he'd intended. After years of struggling with it, he released his fourth novel, "Glamorama", in 1998. "Glamorama" is set in the world of high fashion, following a male model who becomes entangled in a bizarre terrorist organization composed entirely of other models. The book plays with themes of media, celebrity, and political violence, and like its predecessor "American Psycho" it uses surrealism to convey a sense of postmodern dread. Although reactions to the novel were mixed, Ellis holds it in high esteem among his own works: "it's probably the best novel I've written and the one that means the most to me. And when I say "best"—the wrong word, I suppose, but I'm not sure what else to replace it with—I mean that I'll never have that energy again, that kind of focus sustained for eight years on a single project. I'll never spend that amount of time crafting a book that means that much to me. And I think people who have read all of my work and are fans understand that about Glamorama—it's the one book out of the seven I've published that matters the most." Ellis's novel "Lunar Park" (2005) uses the form of a celebrity memoir to tell a ghost story about the novelist "Bret Easton Ellis" and his chilling experiences in the apparently haunted home he shares with his wife and son. In keeping with his usual style, Ellis mixes absurd comedy with a bleak and violent vision.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: In 2010, Ellis released a follow-up to "Less than Zero", "Imperial Bedrooms". Taking place 25 years after the events of "Less than Zero", it combines that book's ennui with the postmodernism of "Lunar Park". It met with disappointing sales.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: For his original screenplay for the Paul Schrader-directed film "The Canyons", Ellis won Best Screenplay at the 14th Melbourne Underground Film Festival, with the film also winning Best Foreign Film, Best Foreign Director and Best Female Actor, for Lindsay Lohan.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Ellis released his first work of non-fiction, "White," a collection of essays on contemporary political culture, in 2019.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: In late 2020, Ellis began to serialize his latest work, a fictionalized memoir called "The Shards", through his podcast. It focuses on his adolescence in Los Angeles and a serial killer called the Trawler. On December 1, 2021, he announced on Instagram that the manuscript of "The Shards" had just arrived for him to look over. On May 20, 2022, he announced that the book could be preordered. It is to be published on January 17, 2023.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Ellis often uses recurring characters and settings. Major characters in one novel may become minor ones in the next, or vice versa. Camden College, a fictional New England liberal arts college, is frequently referenced. It is based on Bennington College, which Ellis attended, and where he met future novelist Jonathan Lethem and befriended fellow writers Donna Tartt and Jill Eisenstadt. In Tartt's "The Secret History" (1992), her version of Bennington is "Hampden College," although there are oblique connections between it and Ellis's "The Rules of Attraction." Eisenstadt and Lethem use "Camden" in "From Rockaway" (1987) and "The Fortress of Solitude" (2003), respectively. Though his three major settings are Vermont, Los Angeles and New York, Ellis has said he doesn't think of these novels as about these places specifically.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Camden is introduced in "Less than Zero", which mentions that both protagonist Clay and minor character Daniel attend it. In "The Rules of Attraction" (1987), set at Camden, Clay (called "the Guy from L.A." before being properly introduced) is a minor character who narrates one chapter; ironically, he longs for the Californian beach, while in Ellis's previous novel he had longed to return to college. On "the guy from L.A.'s door someone wrote 'Rest in Peace Called'"; R.I.P., or Rip, is Clay's dealer in "Less than Zero"; Clay also says that Blair from "Less than Zero" sent him a letter saying she thinks Rip was murdered. Main character Sean Bateman's older brother Patrick narrates one chapter of the novel; he is the infamous central character of Ellis's next novel, "American Psycho." Ellis includes a reference to Tartt's forthcoming "Secret History" in the form of a passing mention of "that weird Classics group ... probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals." There is also an allusion to the main character from Eisenstadt's "From Rockaway."


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: In "American Psycho" (1991), Patrick's brother Sean appears briefly. Paul Denton and Victor Johnson from "The Rules of Attraction" are both mentioned; on seeing Paul, Patrick wonders if "maybe he was on that cruise a long time ago, one night last March. If that's the case, I'm thinking, I should get his telephone number or, better yet, his address." Camden is both Sean's college and the college a minor character named Vanden is going to. Vanden was referred to (but never appeared) in both "Less than Zero" and "The Rules of Attraction". Passages from "Less than Zero" reappear almost verbatim here, with Patrick replacing Clay as narrator. Patrick also makes repeated references to Jami Gertz, the actress who portrays Blair in the 1987 film adaptation of "Less than Zero". Allison Poole from Jay McInerney's 1988 novel "Story of My Life" appears as a torture victim of Patrick's. 1994's "The Informers" features a much younger Timothy Price, one of Patrick's co-workers in "American Psycho," who narrates one chapter. One of the central characters, Graham, buys concert tickets from "Less than Zero"s Julian, and his sister Susan goes on to say that Julian sells heroin and is a male prostitute (as shown in "Zero"). Alana and Blair from "Zero" are also friends of Susan's. Letters to Sean Bateman from a Camden College girl named Anne visiting grandparents in LA comprise the eighth chapter.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: Patrick Bateman appears briefly in "Glamorama" (1998); "Glamorama"'s main characters Victor Ward and Lauren Hynde were first introduced in "The Rules of Attraction". As an in-joke reference to Bateman being portrayed by Christian Bale in the then-in-production 2000 film adaptation, Bale briefly appears as a background character. The book also includes a spy named Russell who is physically identical to Bale, and at one point in the novel impersonates him. Jaime Fields, who has a major role in the book, was first briefly mentioned by Victor in "The Rules of Attraction." Bertrand, Sean and Mitchell, all from "The Rules of Attraction," appear in Camden flashbacks and several other "Rules" characters are referenced. McInerney's Alison Poole makes her second appearance in an Ellis novel as Victor's mistress. "Lunar Park" (2005) is not set in the same "universe" as Ellis's other novels but contains a similar multitude of references and allusions. All of Ellis's previous works are heavily referenced, in keeping with the book-within-a-book structure. McInerney cameos. Donald Kimball from "American Psycho" questions Ellis on a series of "American Psycho"-inspired murders, Mitchell Allen from "Rules" lives next door to and went to college with Ellis (Ellis even recalls his affair with Paul Denton, alluded to in "Rules"), and Ellis recalls a tempestuous relationship with Blair from "Zero." "Imperial Bedrooms" (2010) establishes the conceit that the Clay depicted in "Zero" is not the same Clay who narrates "Bedrooms." In the world of "Imperial Bedrooms," "Zero" was the close-to-nonfiction work of an author friend of Clay's, and its film adaptation (featuring actors Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz and Robert Downey, Jr.) exists within the world of the novel, too.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: In May 2014 Bravo announced that it had teamed up with "The Rules of Attraction" feature film adaptation writer/director Roger Avary and producer Greg Shapiro to develop a limited-run series based on the novel. The plot will stray from the source material and is described as follows: "Inspired by the book and film of the same name, the high-concept series takes the students and faculty at the fictional Camden College and unravels a murder mystery by telling the same story through 12 different points of view. Children of the 1%-ers live as unhinged and wild adults in a Bret Easton Ellis world with seemingly no rules to hold these privileged few down." Titled "Rules of Attraction", the series will be written by Roger Avary ("The Rules of Attraction", "Beowulf") for Lionsgate TV with Greg Shapiro ("Zero Dark Thirty") serving as an executive producer.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: In a 2013 interview with Film School Rejects, Ellis said the original "American Psycho" "doesn't really work as a movie."


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: On November 18, 2013, Ellis launched a podcast with PodcastOne Studios. The aim of the show, which comes in 1-hour segments, is to have Ellis engage in open and honest conversation with his guests about their work, inspirations, and life experiences, as well as music and movies. Ellis, who has always been averse to publicity, has been using the platform to engage in intellectual conversation and debate about his own observations on the media, the film industry, the music scene and the analog vs. digital age in a generational context. Notable guests have included Kanye West, Marilyn Manson, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Kevin Smith, Michael Ian Black, Matt Berninger, Brandon Boyd, B. J. Novak, Gus Van Sant, Joe Swanberg, Ezra Koenig, Ryan Leone, Stephen Malkmus, John Densmore, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, Ivan Reitman, and Adam Carolla.


title: Bret Easton Ellis

text: In April 2018 the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast began a Patreon for instant access to new episodes. $2.00+ is charged per episode, with isolated excerpts occasionally made available to non-patrons.


title: Manchukuo

text: Manchukuo, officially the State of Manchuria prior to 1934 and the Empire of (Great) Manchuria after 1934, was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Manchuria from 1932 until 1945. It was founded as a republic in 1932 after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and in 1934 it became a constitutional monarchy under the "de facto" control of Japan. It had limited international recognition.


title: Manchukuo

text: The area was the homeland of the Manchus, including the emperors of the Qing dynasty. In 1931, Japan seized the region following the Mukden Incident. A pro-Japanese government was installed one year later with Puyi, the last Qing emperor, as the nominal regent and later emperor. Manchukuo's government was dissolved in 1945 after the surrender of Imperial Japan at the end of World War II. The territories claimed by Manchukuo were first seized in the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945, and then formally transferred to Chinese administration in the following year.


title: Manchukuo

text: Demographically, Manchus formed a minority in Manchukuo; the largest ethnic group was Han Chinese. The Japanese population increased immensely under this period, largely in part due to Japan's settlement efforts to move young, land-poor farmers from the inner islands to colonize new land. By 1945, there were more than a million Japanese settlers. The population of Koreans also increased during this Manchukuo period, and there were also Mongols, Russians, and other minorities. The Mongol regions of western Manchukuo were ruled under a slightly different system in acknowledgment of the Mongolian traditions there. The southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula (present-day Dalian) continued to be directly ruled by Japan as the Kwantung Leased Territory until the end of World War II.


title: Manchukuo

text: "Manchukuo" is a variant of the Wade-Giles romanization "Man-chou-kuo" of the Mandarin pronunciation "Mǎnzhōuguó" of the original Japanese name of the state, "Manshūkoku" In Japanese, the name refers to the state of Manchuria, the "region" of the Manchus. The English name, adapted to incorporate the word "Manchu", would mean the state of the Manchu people. Indeed, Manchukuo was often referred to in English as simply "Manchuria", a name for Northeast China which had been particularly employed by the Imperial Japanese to promote its separation from the rest of the country. Other European languages used equivalent terms: Manchukuo was known to its allies as in Italian and or in German. In present-day Chinese, Manchukuo's name is still often prefaced by the word "wěi" (, "so-called", "false", "pseudo-", etc.) to stress its perceived illegitimacy.


title: Manchukuo

text: The formal name of the country was changed to the ""Empire of Manchuria"" (sometimes referred to as "Manchutikuo"), after the establishment of Puyi as the "Kangde Emperor" in 1934. In Chinese and Japanese, the names were "Dà Mǎnzhōu dìguó" and "Dai Manshū teikoku". The "Dà/Dai" ("big", "great") were added after the model of the formal names of the "Great" Ming and Qing dynasties, but this was unused in English.


title: Manchukuo

text: The Japanese had their own motive for deliberately spreading the usage of the term Manchuria. The historian Norman Smith wrote that "The term 'Manchuria' is controversial". Professor Mariko Asano Tamanoi said that she should "use the term in quotation marks" when referring to Manchuria. Herbert Giles wrote that "Manchuria" was unknown to the Manchus themselves as a geographical expression. In his doctoral thesis of 2012, Professor Chad D. Garcia noted that usage of the term "Manchuria" was out of favor in "current scholarly practice" and preferred the term "the northeast".


title: Manchukuo

text: The Qing dynasty, which replaced the Shun and Ming dynasties in China, was founded by Manchus from Manchuria (modern Northeast China). The Manchu emperors separated their homeland in Jilin and Heilongjiang from the Han Liaoning province with the Willow Palisade. This ethnic division continued until the Qing dynasty encouraged the massive immigration of Han in the 19th century during Chuang Guandong to prevent the Russians from seizing the area from the Qing. After conquering the Ming, the Qing identified their state as "China" (中國, Zhongguo; "Central Realm") and referred to it as "Dulimbai Gurun" in Manchu. The Qing equated the lands of the Qing state (including present day Manchuria, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Tibet and other areas) as "China" in both the Chinese and Manchu languages, defining China as a multi-ethnic state, rejecting the idea that China only meant Han areas, and proclaiming that both Han and non-Han peoples were part of "China". The Qing state used "China" to refer to the Qing in official documents, international treaties, and foreign affairs; the "Chinese language" () referred to Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol languages; and the term "Chinese people" (中國人 Zhongguo ren; Manchu: Dulimbai gurun i niyalma) referred to all Han, Manchu and Mongol subjects of the Qing. The lands in Manchuria were explicitly stated by the Qing to belong to "China" (Zhongguo, ) in Qing edicts and in the Treaty of Nerchinsk.