Worth a read: Jim Staley on a "Universal Species Concept" and the history of microbial species concepts

Interesting paper came up in my automated google searches for “phylogenomics”: Transitioning Toward a Universal Species Concept for the Classification of all Organisms | InTechOpen.  It is by Jim Staley who has been writing a lot about microbial species concepts in the last few years.  In addition to trying to bridge the gap between bacteria/archaea and eukaryotes in terms of species concepts.  Not sure how I feel about everything in the paper but it has a really nice history of how species have been defined for bacteria. He breaks down this history into four periods

• Discovery of microorganisms,
• Advent of pure cultures and phenotypic features,
• Introduction of molecular analyses and
• Gene sequencing and genomics.

• Bacteria & archaea don’t get no respect from interesting but flawed #PLoSBio paper on # of species on the planet
• Worth a look (from arXiv): Robust estimation of microbial diversity in theory and in practice
• Mendeley collection on number of species of bacteria and archaea

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen