Ultra-tiny bacteria; bacteria added by 50% (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 27, 2018, 19:20 (2200 days ago) @ David Turell

By using ultra fine filters the branch of bacteria is enlarged by 50%:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/newfound-bacteria-expand-tree-of-life-20150728/

"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.

“'Some of the branches in the tree of life had been noted before,” said Chris Brown, a student in the lab of Jill Banfield and lead author of the paper. “With this study we were able to fill in many gaps.”

"As an organizational tool, the tree of life has been around for a long time. Lamarck had his version. Darwin had another. The basic structure of the current tree goes back 40 years to the microbiologist Carl Woese, who divided life into three domains: eukaryotes, which include all plants and animals; bacteria; and archaea, single-celled microorganisms with their own distinct features. After a point, discovery came to hinge on finding new ways of searching.

***

"DNA sequencing is at the heart of this current study, though the researchers’ success also owes a debt to more basic technology. The team gathered water samples from a research site on the Colorado River near the town of Rifle, Colo. Before doing any sequencing, they passed the water through a pair of increasingly fine filters — with pores 0.2 and 0.1 microns wide — and then analyzed the cells captured by the filters. At this point they already had undiscovered life on their hands, for the simple reason that scientists had not thought to look on such a tiny scale before.

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"The discovery of new organisms is fairly cut and dried: Either you’ve found one or you haven’t. Cataloging organisms, fitting them into the tree of life, involves more judgment calls.

"The researchers divided the 789 organisms into 35 phyla — 28 of which were newly discovered — within the domain bacteria. They based the sorting on the organisms’ evolutionary history and on similarities in the code on the organisms’ 16S rRNA genes — those with at least 75 percent of their code in common went into the same phylum.

"With these new additions, there are now roughly 90 identified bacterial phyla. This is a lot more than there were a year ago, but also far fewer than the 1,300 to 1,500 phyla that microbiologists estimate we’ll have once a complete accounting is finished.

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“'Looking at things from a different angle may offer that possibility of a fourth domain,” he said — an equal partner to bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. “There will always be novel stuff that will teach us foundational info about how life operates.'”

Comment: Life started with bacteria and they are still successfully the biggest biomass. why should there be anything else? My reason is God.