A new tree of life, expanded by the discovery of more than 1,000 new types of bacteria and Archea for the past 15 years has been published. Researchers at University of California Berkeley have rearranged the tree for the new life forms.

First author Laura Hug, a former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow, said that the more than 1,000 newly reported organisms appearing on the revised tree are from a range of environments, including a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park, a salt flat in Chile's Atacama desert, terrestrial and wetland sediments, a sparkling water geyser, meadow soil and the inside of a dolphin's mouth. All of these newly recognized organisms are known only from their genomes.

"The tree of life is one of the most important organizing principles in biology," said Jill Banfield, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science and environmental science, policy and management. "The new depiction will be of use not only to biologists who study microbial ecology, but also to biochemists searching for novel genes and researchers studying evolution and earth history."

For more details about the new tree of life, read the news release at the UC Berkeley website.

Figure: An artistic representation of the tree of life, with the many groups of bacteria on the left, the uncultivable bacteria at upper right (purple), and the Archaea and eukaryotes (green) – which includes humans – at the lower right. Click on image for more detail. (Graphic by Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)