The Growing Tree of Archaea: New Perspectives on Their Diversity, Evolution and Ecology

摘要: The Archaea occupy a key position in the Tree of Life, and are major fraction microbial diversity. Abundant soils, ocean sediments water column, they have crucial roles processes mediating global carbon nutrient fluxes. Moreover, represent an important component human microbiome, where their role health disease is still unclear. development culture-independent sequencing techniques has provided unprecedented access to genomic data from large number so far inaccessible archaeal lineages. This revolutionizing our view diversity metabolic potential wide variety environments, step toward understanding ecological role. tree being rapidly filled up with new branches constituting phyla, classes orders, generating novel challenges for high-rank systematics, providing information dissecting origin this domain, evolutionary trajectories that shaped its current diversity, relationships Bacteria Eukarya. present picture huge Archaea, which we only starting explore.