Next phyloseminar (see http://phyloseminar.org for more information)
Next talk: Carl Woese’s grand view of life that just keeps getting grander"
Phil Hugenholtz (University of Queensland)
Most microorganisms cannot be grown in pure culture (or at least not
easily). This has been apparent for decades by comparing the number of
cells seen under a microscope to the fraction of those cells that will
grow into colony forming units (typically <1%). The objective
classification of cellular life by comparative rRNA analysis pioneered
by Carl Woese provided the first grand view of the tree of life and
also provided the reference framework upon which his friend and
colleague, Norman Pace, developed ways to directly survey microbial
communities via their rRNA sequences without the need to grow them.
This put our degree of ignorance of the microbial world into
perspective: dozens of major microbial lineages have emerged over the
last 20 years that lack even a single cultured representative. New
approaches, such as deep metagenomics and single cell genomics, are
now transforming the rRNA-based phylogenetic outlines of the tree of
life into a fully-fledged genome-based view of the tree. I will
present a recent snapshot overview of the genome tree of the bacterial
and archaeal domains and examples of functional insights in the
context of a more complete view of microbial evolution.
West Coast USA: 16:00 (04:00 PM) on Thursday, June 27
East Coast USA: 19:00 (07:00 PM) on Thursday, June 27
UK: 00:00 (12:00 AM) on Friday, June 28
France: 01:00 (01:00 AM) on Friday, June 28
Japan: 08:00 (08:00 AM) on Friday, June 28
New Zealand: 11:00 (11:00 AM) on Friday, June 28
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