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Newfound Bacteria Expand Tree of Life
An anonymous reader writes: It used to be that to find new forms of life, all you had to do was take a walk in the woods. Now it's not so simple. The most conspicuous organisms have long since been cataloged and fixed on the tree of life, and the ones that remain undiscovered don't give themselves up easily. You could spend all day by the same watering hole with the best scientific instruments and come up with nothing. Maybe it's not surprising, then, that when discoveries do occur, they sometimes come in torrents. Find a different way of looking, and novel forms of life appear everywhere. A team of microbiologists based at the University of California, Berkeley, recently figured out one such new way of detecting life. At a stroke, their work expanded the number of known types — or phyla — of bacteria by nearly 50 percent, a dramatic change that indicates just how many forms of life on earth have escaped our notice so far.
The one that goes MOOOOOO!
>> You could spend all day by the same watering hole with the best scientific instruments and come up with nothing
According to TFA, they DID spend all day by the same watering hole and ended up using the best scientific instruments (really fine filters) to make their discoveries.
>> It used to be that to find new forms of life, all you had to do was take a walk in the woods. Now it's not so simple.
And...if I'm following the TFA, this would still probably yield even more discoveries if a researcher used the same technique.
"It used to be that to find new forms of life, all you had to do was take a walk in the woods."
True if looking for leprechauns; but not mermaids.
I still haven't found the leprechaun, let alone caught him. But I did find a box of lucky charms once.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Having only just skimmed the article, I may have missed some imprtant points, but it seems they are basing this discovery on DNA analysis, which all well and good as far as it goes. What is no doubt valid is that this method yields a classification, but what is less certain - or perhaps highly uncertain - is whether this classification reflects the evolutionary phylogeny of the organisms in the study.
The big problem here is that DNA similarities probably only really match descendancy (or evolutionary relationship) well, when we talk about eukaryotes; this is because eukaryotes have sex: they go through cycles of meiosis/mitosis and all that, in which they recombine their genes in very rigorous way which ensures that DNA is inherited from predecessors. Prokaryotes don't have sex - instead they have different forms of lateral gene transfer, in which genes are acquired from many, seemingly unrelated organisms. The result of this is that the gene pool WITHIN what we perceive as 'a single species' of bacteria, like Eschericia coli, can be wildly different. Presumably there are genes within a single strain, that are fairly constant, and might be used to trace progeny, but I don't think anybody knows which they are yet.
This sounds really big and interesting. I hope there is an Ask Slashdot with Dr. Banfield.
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Yowie and Bigfoot, you're up next!
And when they do find Bigfoot, I'm hoping the Bears draft him as a defensive tackle, because he'd make an awesome 3-technique. Assuming he can pass the drug test.
You are welcome on my lawn.
to be abo07 doing
He combined his love of sailing with ocean microbe sampling to investigate the diversity of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... :-).
Now gene sampling is fairly routine way of mapping biomes all over the ecosphere.
Incidentally Craig perfected the shotgun decodign technique which accelerated decoding the first human genome in the late 1990s (his of course
Correct, genetic testing has been used to discredit all alleged Bigfoot samples brave enough to be tested. They have all turned out to be other known mammals.
come on guys,,
this is an article for NATURE. or some bull-deficate PBS program..
Its because of the short-sided-ness, the lack of understanding (or wanting to understand) your audience,you have all killed it.. :( /.
such an abymisal shame..
it makes me sad. Seeing through all the years how the credibility and readership have grown, attracted by the honesty, integrity, and content provided here..
Not any more.
sadly the overlords have intentionally missed the boat with their heads so far up their own defecation canals, fornicating their reputations posting this crap, and having zero foresight of the future for them selves and what is
I thank the previous editors, writers, and such for many years of great reading and insight..
To our current overlords, fornicating one self comes to mind, but I'll let the community develop their own comments..
Thank you for your time,
me
Life is A DAG
So I have to ask: Did they happen to find the specific bacteria responsible for the common cold yet? (It seems to me that finding it might very well lead directly to curing it, after all...)
The summary spends a lot of time explaining obvious instead of just telling what new has happened.
Certainly not true if by "conspicuous" they mean "ones you can easily see with the naked eye." Most insect and beetle species are not cataloged yet, and for smaller critters the situation is even worse. Heck, you might even find a new frog species in Manhattan.