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Published on: June 17, 2020
Geographic barriers isolate endemic populations of hyperthermophilic archaea
Rachel J Whitaker1, Dennis W Grogan, John W Taylor
1Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, 111 Koshland Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. rwhitaker@nature.berkeley.edu
Abstract:
Barriers to dispersal between populations allow them to diverge through local adaptation or random genetic drift. High-resolution multilocus sequence analysis revealed that, on a global scale, populations of hyperthermophilic microorganisms are isolated from one another by geographic barriers and have diverged over the course of their recent evolutionary history. The identification of a biogeographic pattern in the archaeon Sulfolobus challenges the current model of microbial biodiversity in which unrestricted dispersal constrains the development of global species richness.
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