Besides, it has a cool name

[redbird]

The genome of a very common bacterium has been sequenced, and it has only 1354 genes, and apparently none of the redundancy or clutter of the human genome. Pelagibacter ubique doesn't have the smallest genome known, but the smaller ones sequenced are all from obligate parasites. P. ubique floats in the ocean--everywhere in the ocean--billions of billions of individuals.

ETA: That name translates as "Ubiquitous ocean bacterium", if that counts as "translation".

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Steve Giovannoni, lead scientist on the sequencing project, is somebody I know - our program has funded a lot of his work, although not this particular project. He and his lab (http://mcb.science.oregonstate.edu/giovannoni/) are very cool.

He's also a signator to Project Steve (http://www.(talkorigins.org/faqs/steve/), which is even cooler...)

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

As someone who studies both bacterial and multicellular genomes, I'd hold off the "redundancy and clutter" verdicts until we actually have much idea how all the information needed to make multicellarity work is fitted into the genome.

I'm not denying that Peligibacter ubique doesn't appear to be very good at what it does, but it's not going to be posting to LJ anytime soon :-).

Gemome sizes

[lynnal.livejournal.com]

Generally speaking, bacteria are optimized for speed while larger organisms are optimized for flexibility of various sorts. That means that bacteria don't keep around DNA that they aren't using.

I'm a plant biologist, not a microbiologist, so most of my information is on E. coli and Pseudomonas. Bacteria can pick up extra DNA from other bacteria, even ones that are not really related. That's part of the way antibiotic resistance spreads so fast - the genes are kept on small portable pieces of DNA that get passed around. The genome sizes of wild strains of E. coli are not stable. They can triple in gene content, and they are quite efficient at removing genes that they don't need. Any individual that gets rid of extra DNA first has a slight advantage in energy use over its neighbors, and that adds up quickly.