A New Domain of Life Plenty More Bugs in the Sea  

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Jenis: Article from Bulletin/Magazine
Dalam koleksi: The Economist (http://search.proquest.com/) vol. 398 no. 8726 (Mar. 2011), page 83-84.
Topik: The Linnaean system; classification; domains; eukaryotes; bacteria; archaea; biochemistry; organisms

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Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: EE29.65 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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Life, like Caesar's Gaul, is divided into three parts. The Linnaean system of classification, with its prescriptive hierarchy of species, genus, family, order, class, phylum and kingdom, ultimately lumps everything alive into one of three giant groups known as domains. The most familiar domain, though arguably not the most important to the Earth's overall biosphere, is the eukaryotes. These are the animals, the plants, the fungi and also a host of single-celled creatures, all of which have complex cell nuclei divided into linear chromosomes. Then there are the bacteria--familiar as agents of disease, but actually ecologically crucial. Some feed on dead organic matter. Some oxidise minerals. And some photosynthesise, providing a significant fraction (around a quarter) of the world's oxygen. Bacteria, rather than having complex nuclei, carry their genes on simple rings of DNA which float around inside their cells. The third great domain of life, the archaea, look, under a microscope, like bacteria. For that reason, their distinctiveness was recognised only in the 1970s. Their biochemistry, however, is very different from that of bacteria (they are, for example, the only organisms that give off methane as a waste product), and their separate history seems to stretch back billions of years.

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