Saturday, February 23, 2013

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.
And goes through a bit of detail on each one.  He also discusses what he sees as a need for a universal species concept and even makes some suggestions about how it might be implemented.  Definitely worth a read.  

Some related posts of mine and or links of potential interest:

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