Dr. Tessa Quax has identified the structure of a central protein used by archaea to determine the direction to swim. Archaea are single-cell life forms without a nucleus. She also studied which molecular mechanisms are involved in the transmission of signals from the archaea’s environment to its motility structure. Quax, who is a researcher in the lab of Prof. Dr. Sonja-Verena Albers at the Institute of Biology II of the University of Freiburg, has published her research in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.