Editor's Summary
25 January 2007
Genetic shareware
Will the traditional units of biology — the organism and the species — be swept away in the flood of new genomics data? In the first of a new Essay series, Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese argue that, for microbes at least, it could happen. Free-living marine microbes, unlike their lab-grown 'clonal' cousins, are adept at acquiring useful characteristics from a shared pool of genetic material. It's beginning to look as if a genetic continuum, rather than a series of discrete species, is the natural condition in many instances.
Editorial: Making connections
A series of essays is launched in Nature.
doi:10.1038/445340a
Essay: Biology's next revolution
The emerging picture of microbes as gene-swapping collectives demands a revision of such concepts as organism, species and evolution itself.
Nigel Goldenfeld & Carl Woese
doi:10.1038/445369a
