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> NSF Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research
Online Courses:
Origins of Bacterial Diversity--Biology 337/537 Spring 2003
Welcome to the course! Ideas
about diversity and the nature of species were the brainchildren of
zoologists and botanists. Unfortunately, the zoologists’ and
botanists’ ideas about species do not apply easily to bacteria, at
least until we bend our minds a bit. Through this directed
reading, we will dive
into the controversies surrounding the origins of diversity in the
bacterial world, and I hope to demonstrate that ideas about the
origins of bacterial species are at least as precise and predictive
as those for plants and animals. In addition, I will show how the
new science of genomics can help us characterize the diversity and
ecological functioning of bacteria.
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