A new Tree of Life; getting bushier and more complex (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, July 29, 2015, 15:54 (3404 days ago) @ David Turell

Another article on the findings at Rifle, Colorado. 28 more phyla of tiny bacteria:-https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150728-at-tiny-scales-a-giant-burst-on-tree-of-life/-"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. Recent advances in genetic sequencing and genome binning make Brown and Banfield optimistic, though, that it won't be long before we've mapped them all."