Bacteria go extinct at substantial rates, although appear to avoid the mass extinctions that have hit larger forms of life on Earth, according to new research from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Caltech, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The finding contradicts widely held scientific thinking that microbe taxa, because of their very large populations, rarely die off.
The study, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, used massive DNA sequencing and big data analysis to create the first evolutionary tree encompassing a large fraction of Earth’s bacteria over the past billion years.
“Bacteria rarely fossilize, so we know very little about how the microbial landscape has evolved over time,” says Stilianos Louca, a researcher with UBC’s Biodiversity Research Centre who led the study. “Sequencing and math helped us fill in the bacterial family tree, map how they’ve diversified over time, and uncover their extinctions.”
