Bacterial species can also disappear – and they do so quite often

New research conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) reports that bacteria also die off – and they do so at substantial rates. The results run counter to the widely held notion that bacterial species, because of their very large populations, rarely disappear.

Killing a M. Bacteria

Bacteria are by far one of the most prolific and successful life forms that evolution has spawned on our planet. They are incredibly hardy, very good at drawing energy from their surroundings, and they breed with revenge. These tiny creatures are so resilient and numerous, in fact, that most scientists have taken for granted that bacterial species rarely disappear. However, new research suggests that this is not the case

The team sequenced DNA information from 448,112 different bacterial species and used 60 previous environmental studies to create the most complete bacterial evolutionary tree, . the majority of bacterial species over the last billion years. To get an idea of the evolutionary history of bacteria they drew the traces that speciation (differentiation of new species by evolution) leaves in the genetic constitution of these bacterial lines. The team estimates that there are about 1.4 to 1.9 different bacterial phyla (lineage) on our planet today. They have also been able to estimate how this number varied over time: they report that between 45,000 and 95,000 phyla have died out over the last million years.

"Bacteria rarely fossilize, so we know very little about how the microbial landscape has evolved over time," says Stilianos Louca, principal investigator of the study. "Sequencing and mathematics helped us to fill in the genealogical tree of the bacteria, map out how they have diversified over time and discover their extinctions. "

This is an impressive number. With relatively high extinction (as the team's ratings were fairly stable over time), the bacteria continued to diversify exponentially throughout history. also managed to overcome mbad extinction events at the global scale – those steep events that periodically eliminate plant and animal species – with very little loss. the name The current breed of bacterial lineages is now impressive, "it's only a tiny cliche of the diversity that evolution has generated over the Earth's history," adds -t it.

"This study would not have been possible, years ago," says Michael Doebeli, lead author of the journal and mathematician and zoologist at UBC. "Today's availability of mbadive sequencing data and powerful computing resources allowed us to perform complex mathematical badysis. "

Next, Louca says that he and his team plan to determine how the physiological properties of bacteria evolve with a particular point of interest for them is to determine whether their ecological diversity has increased along with their taxonomic diversity – that is, whether they propagate to new types of species. environments and roles in these environments when the total number of species increases.If so, this would suggest that even organisms as old and simple as bacteria can still find new roles in nature.

The article "Bacterial diversification through geological time" was published in the journal ]