Species “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups” (Mayr, 1942) OEB 192 –

Microbial species “…a category that circumscribes a (preferably) genomically coherent group of individual isolates/strains sharing a high degree of similarity in (many) independent features, comparatively tested under highly standardized conditions” (Stackebrandt et al., 2002) “…characterized by a certain degree of phenotypic consistency, showing 70% of DNA-DNA binding and over 97% of 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene-sequence identity” (Vandamme et al., 1996)

Microbial species (Konstantinidis & Tiedje, 2005)

Genome vs. 16S rRNA diversity? (Thompson et al., 2005)

Evidence of species?: clusters of microheterogeneity (Acinas et al., 2004)

Ecological species definition? (Cohan, 2001)

Monophyletic ecotypes? D E Hunt et al. Science 2008;320:

How do new species emerge? Allopatric speciation Sympatric speciation

“Everything is everywhere – the environment selects.” (Baas-Becking, 1934) Microbial biogeography

Ubiquitous dispersal? Diversity of Paraphysomonas (Finlay, 2002) (Finlay & Clarke, 1999)

Non-random distributions of free-living taxa (Hughes Martiny et al., 2006)

Biogeography: Sulfolobus (Whitaker et al., 2003) Rachel Whitaker MSI chalktalk November 10

Microbes in a host w/ biogeography: Helicobacter pylori (Falush et al.,2003)

Wednesday (9/28): Microbial speciation