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. 

January 30 Bacterial species are real ...
February 6 ... or not  (alternative views of species-less bacterial diversity).
February 13 Bacterial sex is rare ...
February 20 ... but promiscuous.
February 27 Why develop your own adaptations when you can appropriate them from other species?
March 6 Speciation in bacteria may be happening everywhere, every day.
March 27 Sequence-based approaches to mapping bacterial biodiversity:  how to discover ecological diversity within the bacterial world even when we are ignorant of the ecology.
April 3 “Everything is everywhere, and the milieu selects”  ... or not. (Can there be isolated, Galapagos-like adaptive radiations in the bacterial world, or is everything everywhere?)
April 10 Genome-based approaches to discovering bacterial biodiversity.
April 17 What promotes adaptive radiation in bacteria?
April 24 The nitty-gritty of speciation in pathogens.