Plant-Eating Microbes Expand the Tree of Life
After microbes called archaea were discovered in the 1970s, a branch was added to the tree of life after some debate, when it was decided that archaea are not bacteria or eukaryotes (a branch that includes animals and plants). The placement of that branch is still being debated to some degree. Now researchers have discovered another group of archaea. They re heat-lovers that have been found in hot springs and hydrothermal sediments, and they seem to have an important part in the global carbon cycle because they can break decaying plants down but don t generate methane in the process. The findings have been reported in