Genomics and the bacterial species problem

Whether or not bacteria have species is a perennially vexatious question. Given what we now know about variation among bacterial genomes, we argue that there is no intrinsic reason why the processes driving diversification and adaptation must produce groups of individuals sufficiently coherent in their genetic and phenotypic properties to merit the designation 'species' - although sometimes they might.

• Publication year

  2006

• Venue

  Genome Biology

• Publication date

  2006-09-29

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1186/gb-2006-7-9-116PMID 17020593PMCID 1794555
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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