A newly drawn Tree of Life, built by Laura Hug, Jill Banfield and colleagues from genomes sequenced directly out of environmental samples, more than doubles the size of the bacterial trunk. Much of that growth is a group nobody had seen before, the candidate phyla radiation.
These microbes cannot be grown in the lab, and their 16S ribosomal RNA genes differ enough that standard surveys missed them. Yet they appear to hold most of Earth’s biodiversity, and about half of their genes are unlike any known genes.
via A newly drawn Tree of Life reminds us to question what we know | TED Ideas