Abstract
A single archaeal species, Sulfolobus islandicus, from an isolated volcanic hot spring in Kamchatka, Russia, is at the point of diverging into two new species, according to microbiologist Rachel Whitaker from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and her collaborators at the University of California, Davis, and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Their findings, apparently the first observed instance of sympatric speciation—one lineage becoming two—in a microorganism, provide an illuminating glimpse of how strains in the same niche can diverge. Details appear in the February 2012 PLoS Biology 10(2):e1001265 (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio. e1001265).
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