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Originally published in Science Express on 24 July 2003
Science 15 August 2003:
Vol. 301. no. 5635, pp. 976 - 978
DOI: 10.1126/science.1086909
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Reports

Geographic Barriers Isolate Endemic Populations of Hyperthermophilic Archaea

Rachel J. Whitaker,1* Dennis W. Grogan,2 John W. Taylor1

Barriers to dispersal between populations allow them to diverge through local adaptation or random genetic drift. High-resolution multilocus sequence analysis revealed that, on a global scale, populations of hyperthermophilic microorganisms are isolated from one another by geographic barriers and have diverged over the course of their recent evolutionary history. The identification of a biogeographic pattern in the archaeon Sulfolobus challenges the current model of microbial biodiversity in which unrestricted dispersal constrains the development of global species richness.

1 Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, 111 Koshland Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
2 Department of Biological Sciences, ML006, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rwhitaker{at}nature.berkeley.edu

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