On the origin of prokaryotic species the taxonomy of halophilic Archaea 英文参考文献.docVIP

Saline Systems BioMedCentral Commentary Open Access On the origin of prokaryotic species: the taxonomy of halophilic Archaea Priya DasSarma and Shiladitya DasSarma* Address: University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, Center of Marine Biotechnology, 701 East Pratt Street, Baltimore, MD 21202, USA Email: Priya DasSarma - dassarmp@; Shiladitya DasSarma* - dassarma@ * Corresponding author Published: 16 May 2008 Received: 30 April 2008 Accepted: 16 May 2008 Saline Systems 2008, 4:5 doi:10.1186/1746-1448-4-5 This article is available from: /content/4/1/5 ? 2008 DasSarma and DasSarma; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract The consistent use of the taxonomic system of binomial nomenclature (genus and species) was first popularized by Linnaeus nearly three-hundred years ago to classify mainly plants and animals. His main goal was to give labels that would ensure that biologists could agree on which organism was under investigation. One-hundred fifty years later, Darwin considered the term species as one of convenience and not essentially different from variety. In the modern era, exploration of the worlds niches together with advances in genomics have expanded the number of named species to over 1.8 million, including many microorganisms. However, even this large number excludes over 90% of microorganisms that have yet to be cultured or classified. In naming new isolates in the microbial world, the challenge remains the lack of a universally held and evenly applied standard for a species. The definition of species based on the capacity to form fertile offspring is not applicable to microorganisms and 70% DNA-DNA hybridization appears rather crude in light o