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A molecular view of microbial diversity and the biosphere
A molecular view of microbial diversity and the biosphere.
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Over three decades of molecular-phylogenetic studies, researchers have compiled an increasingly robust map of evolutionary diversification showing that the main diversity of life is microbial, distributed among three primary relatedness groups or domains: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya. The general properties of representatives of the three domains indicate that the earliest life was based on inorganic nutrition and that photosynthesis and use of organic compounds for carbon and energy metabolism came comparatively later. The application of molecular-phylogenetic methods to study natural microbial ecosystems without the traditional requirement for cultivation has resulted in the discovery of many unexpected evolutionary lineages; members of some of these lineages are only distantly related to known organisms but are sufficiently abundant that they are likely to have impact on the chemistry of the biosphere.
Pace NR
Science (New York, N.Y.)
1997-05-02 00:00
276
5313
734-40
Archaea,Bacteria,Bacterial Physiology,Ecosystem,Energy Metabolism,Environmental Microbiology,Evolution,Genome, Bacterial,Phylogeny,RNA, Bacterial,RNA, Ribosomal,Sequence Analysis, RNA,rRNA Operon,RNA, Bacterial,RNA, Ribosomal
Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3102, USA nrpacenatureberkeleyedu
Science
0036-8075
897
True
9115194
