The underestimation of global microbial diversity
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Microbiology, Taxonomy, Statistics
- Keywords
- microbial diversity, rare biosphere, census, scaling laws, Earth Microbiome Project, biodiversity
- Copyright
- © 2016 Lennon et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. The underestimation of global microbial diversity. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2357v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2357v1
Abstract
In a recent commentary, Amann and Rosselló-Mórab summarize how the census of Bacteria and Archaea has changed over time (1). For decades, the number of recognized microbial taxa was underestimated owing to limitations associated with culture-based methods and the rules of nomenclature. The authors describe a "quantum leap" in the estimates of global microbial diversity following advances in high-throughput sequencing technology. Despite this, Amann and Rosselló-Mórab project that a complete census of microbial diversity will be reached within a few years culminating in the lower millions of taxa (1). While perhaps attractively optimistic to some, this presumption is misleading for the following reasons.
Author Comment
This letter is currently under review.