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One of the most detailed genomic studies of any ecosystem to date has revealed an underground world of stunning microbial diversity, and added dozens of new branches to the tree of life.
The bacterial bonanza comes from scientists who reconstructed the genomes of more than 2,500 microbes from sediment and groundwater samples collected at an aquifer in Colorado. The effort was led by researchers from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley. DNA sequencing was performed at the Joint Genome Institute, a DOE Office of Science User Facility.
As reported online October 24 in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists netted genomes from 80 percent of all known bacterial phyla, a remarkable degree of biological diversity at one location. They also discovered 47 new phylum-level bacterial groups, naming many of them after influential microbiologists and other scientists. And they learned new insights about how microbial communities work together to drive processes that are critical to the planet's climate and life everywhere, such as the carbon and nitrogen cycles.
The team responsible has single-handedly doubled the number of known bacterial groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @09:59PM
It's all a liberal conspiracy! Micro-organisms do not exist! Microscopes have secret chips in them that project fake wiggly things in the lens. Common sense tells you that something that small cannot be alive. How do you fit a spleen, heart, pancreases etc. into something smaller than flea poop? It's illogical! And there are no bacteria mentioned in the Bible.
Vladimir Stalin made them up so that he could blame capitalists for rotting milk in their slow noncompetitive gov't milk shipments. Everyone else knows it's Infra-Red-Commie Waves that make milk go bad. End communism and milk will last 100 years! Twinkies do because patriotic God-fearing free enterprise made them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @10:55PM
It is much more mundane than that. They use a definition of species that simply does not work very will for the organisms under study here, so they can produce vast numbers of "new discoveries" that look like huge progress for grant monies. In reality, using the current definition there are probably billions of different bacterial species, so this is almost no progress at all. It is a pointless method of classifying something like that. Imagine how observational astronomy would slow to crawl if astronomers used a billion different classes of stars when trying to understand what was going on.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539005/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:45PM
When the discoveries are new, they perhaps shouldn't even attempt to classify them. Just say, "We found lots of organisms we don't recognize yet."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:00PM
It would probably be best to try to classify them, but do it using a meaningful classification scheme. You could even just do something like k-means clustering where you pick the number of clusters a priori for practical reasons.