Biology's next revolution

The emerging picture of microbes as gene-swapping collectives demands a revision of such concepts as organism, species and evolution itself. Will the traditional units of biology — the organism and the species — be swept away in the flood of new genomics data? In the first of a new Essay series, Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese argue that, for microbes at least, it could happen. Free-living marine microbes, unlike their lab-grown 'clonal' cousins, are adept at acquiring useful characteristics from a shared pool of genetic material. It's beginning to look as if a genetic continuum, rather than a series of discrete species, is the natural condition in many instances.

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