Editorial: New insights into the genetic mechanisms of thermophilic archaea

Archaea were recognized as the third domain of cellular life, besides Bacteria and Eukarya, by Carl Woese and George Fox in 1977 (Woese and Fox, 1977). Since then, it has been widely proved that archaea share common features with bacteria in many metabolic aspects, whereas their machineries of DNA transactions resemble those of the eukaryotic counterpart. Indeed, archaeal enzymes and regulatory proteins that constitute the DNA transactions machineries are usually simpler eukaryotic-like versions (Greci and Bell, 2020; Koonin et al., 2020). Taking advantages of the in vitro stability of their proteins/enzymes as well as of the design of powerful genetic manipulation tools, thermophilic archaea have established as simpler prokaryotic model systems to explore the complexity of eukaryotic genetic mechanisms.