Life's 'dark matter' detected at last

• Autores: Alice Klein
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3143, 2017, pág. 6
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Donovan Parks of the University of Queensland in Australia and his team analyzed more than 1500 metagenomes uploaded to a public database. Each contained jumbles of DNA from places like soil, the ocean, industrial effluent and baboon feces. Using heavy-duty computers to sift through this mess, the team reconstructed 7280 bacterial and 623 archaeal genomes. About a third were new to science. The new microbes add 20 major branches, or phyla, to the tree of life. "To give this context, every single insect on Earth belongs to just one phylum, and every single animal with a backbone belongs to one phylum, so this is crazy new levels of stuff," says Nicholas Coleman at the University of Sydney