Caroline Turner, Richard Lenski, and Zachary Blount, the authors of “Replaying evolution…” Here is one more well-crafted and insightful piece of work from Rich Lenski’s lab, with a twist on the origins and coexistence of bacterial species. As the PLoS ONE editor for this piece, I found Turner et al.’s “Replaying Evolution” piece a … Read more
I just discovered the DSMZ’s BacDive database, and I’d like to recommend it. BacDive is an eminently searchable metadatabase on 53,978 strains, with information on morphology and physiology, culture and growth conditions, environmental and isolation data, and more. An update was recently described in Nucleic Acids Research. I discovered BacDive while reading an interesting paper … Read more
Several years ago I was commissioned by Elsevier to revise Ernst Mayr’s entry on “Species” in their Encyclopedia of Genetics. I was honored to be revising Mayr’s chapter, as he profoundly influenced me (and many thousands of others) on the nature of species. Because I have come to disagree with Mayr on many issues of … Read more
