Taxa Dollars

by Elio
 

Nameless orphaned bacteria from a lake sediment. Courtesy of D. E. Caldwell. Pre­viously published on the covers of the 2003 issues of International Microbio­logy.

"Encyclopedia of Life To Catalogue Species" is the head­line in the Washington Post that announces a multi-in­stitutional grant of $12.5 million to list and describe 1.8 million species that have a name (about $7 a species). The estimate is that only 10% of all species fall in this category. From what we're learning about bacteria and archaea, the proportion for "our" organisms is almost certainly much lower. Microbes should get a quantity discount.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Bob Murray]

Certainly it will cost a lot of dollars before we come to terms with the problem of how to assimilate all the genomic information that is accumulating into a rational classification of all the bacteria and archaea and still have a straightforward way of being able to talk and write about particular forms. Up to now a basis on "types" recognized as species have worked. However the boundaries of species as defined up to now get fuzzier and fuzzier, which seems quite reasonable in a mutagenic world with freedom to exchange nucleotide assemblies. So the molecularly inclined are not happy with species as they see them and have expressed this in a recent Colloquium of the American Academy of Microbiology. Interestingly the contributors come to no conclusion of what must be done except to encourage finding a way and seem to state that there will have to b e some choice of genomic sequences as points of reference for whatever is identified as a recognizable form. Sounds like "types" again and like "species". Plus ça change.....!