Principles of microbial diversity / James W. Brown, Department of Biological Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Includes index.

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Cover; Contents; Preface; Acknowledgments; About the Author; SECTION I: Introduction to Microbial Diversity; 1 What Is Microbial Diversity?; Facets of microbial diversity; The fundamental similarity of all living things; 2 Context and Historical Baggage; The evolution of evolutionary thought; Taxonomy and phylogeny; The false eukaryote-prokaryote dichotomy; 3 Phylogenetic Information; Deciding which organisms and sequences to use in the analysis; Obtaining the required sequence data; Assembling sequences in a multiple-sequence alignment; 4 Constructing a Phylogenetic Tree. Tree construction: the neighbor-joining methodHow to read a phylogenetic tree; Example analysis; 5 Tree Construction Complexities; Substitution models; Treeing algorithms; Bootstrapping; 6 Alternatives to Small-Subunit rRNA Analysis; SSU rRNA cannot be used to distinguish closely related organisms; Alternative sequences; Alternatives to sequence-based methods; 7 The Tree of Life; Major lessons of the "Big Tree of Life"; Rooting the "Tree of Life"; The caveat of horizontal transfer; SECTION II: The Microbial Zoo; 8 Primitive Thermophilic Bacteria; Phylum Aquificae (Aquifex and relatives). Phylum Thermotogae (Thermotoga and relatives)Other primitive thermophiles; Thermophilic ancestry of Bacteria; Life at high temperatures; 9 Green Phototrophic Bacteria; Phylum Chloroflexi (green nonsulfur bacteria); Phylum Chlorobi (green sulfur bacteria); Phylum Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae); Other green phototrophs; Bacterial photosynthesis; Carbon fixation; 10 Proteobacteria; Phylum Proteobacteria (purple bacteria and relatives); Class Alphaproteobacteria; Class Betaproteobacteria; Class Gammaproteobacteria; Class Deltaproteobacteria; Class Epsilonproteobacteria. The concept of "proteobacteria"11 Gram-Positive Bacteria; What does being gram positive mean?; An alternative view of gram-positive bacteria; Phylum Firmicutes (low G+C gram-positive bacteria); Phylum Actinobacteria (high G+C gram-positive bacteria); Bacterial development; Bacterial multicellularity; 12 Spirochetes and Bacteroids; Phylum Spirochaetae; Phylum Bacteroidetes (sphingobacteria or Bacteroides/Flavobacterium/Cytophaga group); Bacterial motility; 13 Deinococci, Chlamydiae, and Planctomycetes; Phylum Deinococcus-Thermus; Phylum Chlamydiae (Chlamydia and relatives). Phylum Planctomycetes (Planctomyces and relatives)Reductive evolution in parasites; 14 Bacterial Phyla with Few or No Cultivated Species; How do we know about these organisms?; Phyla with few cultivated species; Phyla with no cultivated species; Phylogenetic groups at all levels are dominated by uncultivated sequences; How much of the microbial world do we know about?; 15 Archaea; General properties of the Archaea; Phylum Crenarchaeota; Phylum Euryarchaeota; Phylum Korarchaeota; Phylum Nanoarchaeota; Archaea as . . .; 16 Eukaryotes; General properties of the eukaryotes; Unikonta; Plantae.

Every speck of dust, drop of water, and grain of soil and each part of every plant and animal contain their own worlds of microbes.

Designed as a key text for upper-level undergraduates majoring in microbiology, genetics, or biology, Principles of Microbial Diversity provides a solid curriculum for students to explore the enormous range of biological diversity in the microbial world. Within these richly illustrated pages, author and professor James W. Brown provides a practical guide to microbial diversity from a phylogenetic perspective in which students learn to construct and interpret evolutionary trees from DNA sequences. He then offers a survey of the “tree of life” that establishes the necessary basic knowledge about the microbial world. Finally, the author draws the student’s attention to the universe of microbial diversity with focused studies of the contributions that specific organisms make to the ecosystem.

Principles of Microbial Diversity fills an empty niche in microbiology textbooks by providing an engaging, cutting-edge view of the “microbial zoo” that exists around us, covering bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, and viruses.