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Published Online July 24, 2003
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1086909

Reports

Submitted on May 16, 2003
Accepted on June 10, 2003

Geographic Barriers Isolate Endemic Populations of Hyperthermophilic Archaea

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

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.

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.


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