Frontiers in Genomics

Recent genomics approaches, metagenomics, have greatly improved our sampling of natural diversity and uncovered previously unknown microbial lineages. This revolution revealed the huge biodiversity that is out there, unknown to us, evidencing the enormous number of exciting fundamentals in biology to be discovered in the so-called non-model organism. Amongst the big questions that these discoveries promise to answer is the Tree of Life. The relationship between the three domains of life is still one of the most important unanswered question in Biology.

Members of the bacterial Planctomycetes-Verrucomicrobia-Chlamydiae (PCV) superphylum display features that are rarely observed in bacteria, some of which are usually more associated with eukaryotes or archaea. I will show how the study of these bacteria participate in our exploration of the biodiversity and can redefine our understanding of the Tree of Life.