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. (Graphic by Zosia Rostomian, Berkeley Lab)
“Using the single-celled sequencing techniques that she had perfected at the Joint Genome Institute, Woyke and her colleagues ended up with exactly 201 genomes from these candidate phyla, representing 29 branches on the tree of life that scientists knew nothing about. ‘For many phyla, this was the first genomic data anyone had seen,’ she says.”
A story on uncovering the hidden branches of the tree of life highlights the work done by Microbial Program head Tanja Woyke, utilizing single-cell genomics to identify microbial dark matter. Also featured in the piece is the research by longtime collaborator Jill Banfield of UC Berkeley, work on which we collaborated with her team. Click here to revisit our collaborations with Jill Banfield’s lab as featured in this story.
Click here to read the full story on the PBS Nova site.